


The Long Cold Night

by Barkour



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: M/M, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-18 17:37:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4714580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A confluence of events see the Iron Bull and Dorian trapped in a blizzard with little aid but what they can offer each other. A demon lurks in the storm, but the brewing unease between Dorian and the Bull might be what really undoes them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Long Cold Night

**Author's Note:**

> Hooray for the Adoribull Mini Bang!
> 
> Thank you to Alice for the suggestions and corrections, to Molly for giving it a once over, to the moderator and organizer of the Adoribull Mini Bang for their work and for setting this all off, and to Zumie, who prompted something involving Dorian, Bull, and having to huddle together in the cold, back in February or possibly March. 
> 
> Too, I owe a great gratitude to the two wonderful artists who chose to work on this story. [zeffyamethyst](http://archiveofourown.org/users/zeffyamethyst) created the lovely cover you see below, and I am still so pleased at even the thought of having a cover! Like for a book! And for _this_! [cathybites](http://archiveofourown.org/users/cathybites) crafted the gorgeous (and aching) illustrations included in the story. Please give them both love. I don't know that I can give them enough! You can also, if you so desire, [reblog cathybites' art on Tumblr](http://stupidlullabies.tumblr.com/post/128213867127/my-art-for-barkours-freaking-amazing-story-omg).
> 
> Content warnings: canon typical homophobia, demon nonsense, and the Bull struggles some with the concept of "madness."

[](http://tinypic.com?ref=k6l1i)

1.

The stillness, the darkness, the cold: he thought it death. Death would not welcome thought. The Bull's head clanged; a great violence had stunned him; the knee of his left leg was pain and only pain, a screaming mindless heat. The leg ended there. He felt nothing but this.

Seheron. Even as he named it, the Bull knew it to be wrong. Seheron had sweltering jungles, thick rains, clear skies that stuck in your throat like fog. It did not have winter, or Dorian. The demon, he thought; they'd come out hunting a demon in the low mountains, and then: what was it?

A little light illuminated the enclosing pocket, and Dorian. Barrier light: faint, flickering, a sickly green. They were but scant inches apart. Dorian's breath came warm along the side of the Bull's breast. Warm and faint. Flickering.

The Bull tried to move. The one shoulder twinged; the other arm was twisted, caught behind his back. He made out a foot connected to his left leg, but the knee was off-kilter. Shit, he thought. Again.

"Dorian." His voice scraped in his throat and at his skull. "Hey--Dorian."

Dorian's eyelids twitched. His pupils, black, remained unfocused. Something shifted outside the barrier, compacting against the curve. Snow. The Bull finally placed it. Snow.

"Shit," said the Bull. The snow engulfed them. "Dorian. Hey, big guy, need you to wake up here. C'mon. Need you with me here. Dorian!"

The knob in Dorian's throat worked. He groaned, or sighed, and his eyes closed. The light gleamed off his temple, slicked. Melted snow, or blood. What the hell had happened? They'd been under maybe a minute, maybe two. The snow settled. Blood, the Bull thought. Iron, in his nose. The barrier was dimming. Not panic, nipping at the Bull then. Not panic.

"Hey," said the Bull loudly. "Mage boy. It's time to wake the fuck up!" 

With his bad leg he kicked at Dorian. The injury, he trusted, would pull the blow. He missed and caught the barrier instead; fire exploded up his thigh. The Bull gritted his teeth against it and kicked again.

Dorian snapped his head up, and the Bull snapped his free hand out, busted shoulder be damned. He caught the slope of Dorian's head against his palm. It was the Bull's wrist that thumped the barrier. Bad sign: the joint should have cracked. Dorian's barriers were not to be shat on unless you wanted that crap coming right back.

"Where," Dorian began, speech muzzy and eyes wild. "[I'm at]--Iron Bull?" He touched his side, where the Bull had connected. "What--"

No time for smartass remarks. "You need to shore up that barrier of yours," said the Bull.

Dorian's expression began to clear. His fingers moved now to palpate his temple. Blood wetted his fingers; he winced from them.

"Where the hell are we? What happened?"

"Avalanche," said the Bull. "Buried in snow. I don't know how far down. We've got some air 'cause you got a bubble up but it's not gonna last long."

He twitched his free hand to demonstrate the little space. His palm brushed Dorian's nape, and Dorian jerked away, nearly hitting his head against the barrier anyway. They both of them stilled. The Bull took his hand back and showed Dorian his palm: peace.

"Gently," muttered Dorian, hand at his head, the line of his arm masking his eyes, "my head's already split." 

He at least had avoided too much injury, but for the gash on his head. Dorian felt along the edges of the barrier, his broad fingers black against the light. 

"Which way's up?"

The Bull thought. "Head's dizzy. So that way." He gestured toward their bent and tangled legs.

Dorian drew a breath. 

"Not so deep," said the Bull, unable to resist. 

"You'll have air enough for a king in a minute," said Dorian sourly. He splayed his hands flat upon the barrier and closed his eyes again. 

For a moment, in the shivering, fading light the barrier cast upon him, he looked like a pagan statue, and the black curls of his disarrayed hair were like the turning of flames. He'd looked like that through the canvas of the tent, a silhouette bent and burning with the fire behind him. The Bull's breath held in his throat.

The light went out.

2.

The swollen pain in his head lingered, but Dorian was no stranger to headaches that insisted on keeping company long past what was proper. His shoulders ached too; so did the reservoir that sat in what he thought his bones, that slithering river connecting his mortal flesh to the Fade. His bones were dry. The beating of his blood drowned out all other.

He reached anyway into the trickling stream, and he worked his hands deep into the mud; and in the physical world where the air thinned and the Bull's hot breath moved across his blood-sticky brow, Dorian pushed against the barrier. Stone without texture, the barrier resisted. It was weak and he was faint. He felt the blood trickling slowly and inexorably down the side of his face, nearer to his cheek. Blood, blood, blood. Always blood. He pushed, and the barrier expanded, and Dorian opened his eyes and lifted his head to see. 

They were at the bottom of a bubble that tripled its size, quadrupled, more, exploding around them so that the Bull gripped Dorian's shoulder in his hand and brought his arm out from behind his back to splay a hand on the barrier. The snow receded. Dorian shoved it away; he shoved it down; and the river's bed was cracked and dried, and the barrier winked out. 

The Bull swore. Dorian said, "I'm fine," and swatted the Bull's arm from him.

"Head's bleeding." 

The Bull raised his hand as though to touch Dorian's temple, but his fingers only hovered there beside it. How hard the blow that had taken Dorian? The suggestion of heat coming from the Bull's skin was such that Dorian, weary and made brittle, thought to press his head to the Bull's hand.

"I must have--cracked it," Dorian said shortly, "on the barrier, when we..." He looked into the night.

Nothing was to be seen. They sat at the bottom of a wide depression, the extent of which he could not determine. A blizzard of some new magnitude raged. No stars, no black sky: only snow, driving snow, and a wind that screamed, beating at their faces. The whole of the world was reduced to a matter of yards. He stared, uncomprehending.

"It happens like that," said the Bull. "White out. Probably never saw shit like that before you left home, huh?" 

Dorian turned to the Bull. The Bull was leaning toward him, and Dorian found he too leaned, first toward the Bull then, once he'd caught himself, out of his shadow.

"Where's Estera?" asked Dorian. "Vivienne?"

The Bull shrugged. His features were marshaled, his expression blank. But that wasn't so: grim lines pulled at his eye. 

"They were higher up than us," he said. "Avalanche might've missed them."

"Then we need to find them, and--" 

Dorian made to stand, and the Bull did catch him then. His arm was steadying across Dorian's back, and mortification clenched in Dorian's gut. Dorian's nose had fitted to the Bull's throat.

He shoved the Bull away from him, or rather shoved himself away from the Bull.

"Let go of me."

"Easy," said the Bull. He rubbed at his own shoulder and grimaced. "Don't force yourself. You got a hell of a knock to your head."

"That doesn't mean I need your help to my feet."

"Okay," said the Bull. "I believe you."

"I do know how to stand." His tongue was slick in his mouth. It came neatly against his teeth. "I can even walk."

"You really want to do this right now?" asked the Bull.

Dorian scoured at his face with his hand. He allowed himself a moment to hide behind his hand. The line of blood was drying swiftly now, chilled by the wind.

"No." He dropped his hand. "I apologize. That was uncharitable of me."

"So long as you remember that," said the Bull, and Dorian bristled. "Anyway. I'm gonna need you to help me up."

"Oh, of course," said Dorian, "I'll just toss you over my shoulder and carry you back up the mountain. What a farce." He muttered the last.

The Bull said, "Knee," and together they considered his left knee and the crushed mess of the brace and the angle of the joint.

"I don't suppose you have any health potions on you," said Dorian tiredly.

The Bull felt at his pockets, and Dorian, driven to the Bull's side by the unrelenting wind, leaned in to help. In a pocket, Dorian found the shattered remains of a bottle and some wetted, iced potion, the medicinal smell of which suggested health. 

"Why did you have it in your pocket?"

"Because that's where I put it." The Bull, shifting, grunted. "Here. Trade you."

He tossed Dorian a small bottle taken from the pouch on his belt. The contents of the bottle glowed as Dorian shook it, small elements in the concoction disturbed and swirling in the manufactured currents: lyrium.

3.

Ever a gentleman, Dorian rested the bottle between his legs to offer the Bull the iced remains of the health potion. He'd done similar last night: pouring a glass of mead for the Bull when the Bull had expected to pour his own glass. Dorian had complained about the mead.

"What, you prefer grog?" the Bull had teased, and Dorian had quaffed half a glass and said, "Actually, I prefer a, an Emestri 9:12, red."

"Hey, hold on," said the Bull, "you just burp in the middle of a sentence? Dorian! The scandal!"

"Oh, shut up," Dorian had said, swallowing the last of his one drink and rising, "this is your fault anyway."

The Bull pushed away thoughts of the rest. 

"You could drink first," the Bull noted. "I won't hold it against you."

"Just give me your hand," said Dorian. 

The Bull opened his mouth instead when Dorian would have dumped the ice in his hand. Lucky for Dorian he couldn't flush. His shoulders went straight as a chantry sister's though, and his chin rose too. The Bull needled him.

"Watch those dirty thoughts."

"Whose thoughts are dirty?" asked Dorian, same as ever, and the Bull eased. 

"I don't want to lose any of it."

Dorian said, "Well--yes, that makes--obviously," and hurriedly he tossed the lot of it into the Bull's mouth. He managed to do it without ever brushing the Bull's lips, too. Impressive. 

"Nice aim," said the Bull. He swallowed all of it without chewing. Dorian looked away. "Thanks."

Dorian spared him a glance. "How's your knee?"

"Still busted," said the Bull. "Haven't met a health potion that could twist a kneecap around."

"Well, we need to get out of the wind," said Dorian. "Do you suppose..." He hesitated.

"Okay," said the Bull, "first, you need to drink. I don't know what it's like for you but Dalish gets real woozy when she's out of mana."

"Ah--right," said Dorian. "There is that."

He popped the cork and downed the lyrium, in three long swallows that rippled through his throat. The knob bobbed, clenching, dropping. The Bull palmed his knee. The pain lingered, throbbing hot as a sore; he drew on that as he dug his thumb into the joint. 

Recorking the empty bottle, so absurd a thing to do, Dorian made to pitch it into the blowing snow.

The Bull left off his knee. "Hey, hold up."

"It's only dead weight now."

"Pack it with snow," the Bull said. "Heat it up later and you can get some of the dregs in with the water."

Dorian paused. He withdrew his arm, and the Bull rested as Dorian did as he'd suggested. The health potion gave a little warmth to the Bull. Half the warmth was fantasy. He'd closed his eyes, something he knew only when he heard Dorian stand and he opened his eyes again.

"Come on," said Dorian. He offered the Bull his hands.

Together they got the Bull to his feet, though the first step showed the Bull could not walk, not alone. He stumbled and fell against Dorian, but Dorian had planted his feet hard into the snow and like a great oak he could not be knocked over. The sturdy set of Dorian's shoulders braced the Bull. He was not a small man, Dorian. 

"That was a good idea," Dorian said, "refilling the bottle. Thank you." 

"Ah--you're welcome." 

The Bull laid his arm delicately across Dorian's shoulders. His hand hesitated at the man's arm. Shit, he thought, they had to get over it sooner or later. He gripped Dorian's arm, and Dorian in turn gripped the Bull's wrist.

Dorian nodded in the direction the wind originated. The Bull followed the line of his jaw, dark skin smooth-shaved, the angle of it broad. The wind bit at his eye. 

"If we can get to that side of the hollow, we'll be protected from most of the wind. Do you think you can make it that far?"

"I'll make it," said the Bull. "Let's go."

They walked together, slowly, heads bent against the wind as they pushed through it and the snow like ice, like thin knives to cut at them. When the bottle had burst in the Bull's pocket, it had driven glass into his thigh. The skin itched, wounded yet frosted with health potion.

"Not much further," said Dorian.

"Mm." 

The Bull tightened his arm around Dorian's shoulders, and Dorian did not pull from him. Every step lanced through the Bull. His knee wrenched at him; he wanted badly to scratch at his right thigh; his shoulders throbbed. Again he had to order his thoughts. Again. 

"If the others were caught in the avalanche..."

He thought of Vivienne. She'd raised her brow that morn when the Bull offered to walk with her. Insidious, the wondering. The doubt it carried with it. Trust in Vivienne and fool-headed Adaar.

"They weren't," he said.

"We have to consider it."

"They weren't," the Bull insisted.

Dorian let it lie. 

The Bull's leg itched. The wind was howling, and beneath the noisome rage of it was something like a tune. The Bull wondered if that was what it sounded like, going mad. 

The heat in him had gone. Cold returned. The snow drove into his eye, and he looked to his feet to stop the stinging.

They went on together, the Bull bent over Dorian, mindful of the angle of his horns, and Dorian walking steadily, bearing the Bull against his shoulder.

4.

The depression offered some shelter, and Dorian strengthened it with rudimentary spellwork: earth-moving spells appropriated to make walls from snow. The Bull lent a suggestion or two.

"Always an opinion on architecture."

"Don't turn it against the wind," said the Bull, "make it go with it."

"And you're the expert?"

The Bull, settled in the shadow, shrugged. "My old tama' was. She made a study of it. Figuring out how things went." He said it frankly. No ghost lingered in his voice. His eye fixed on no distant point.

Dorian made grumbling noise but adjusted accordingly, so the walls as they tapered to a narrow mouth did not jut into the wind. The particular thirst of mana loss, though slaked, continued to prick at his throat. They had so little to burn and to feed a fire from magic would eat away at his refilling reservoirs. What other choice? 

"Fortunately fire's always been second nature to me," said Dorian. Busy tongue, busy hands. "First, some would say, but my temper's well tempered now."

"Got your temperature down?"

"Yes, exactly that."

The Bull grinned. Dorian busied with the fire, setting its boundaries with the glyph. The Bull ought to have laughed at so easy a joke. The more obvious a punch line, the richer his glee.

Pursing his lips, Dorian blew life into the flames. Long tongues of fire unfurled; the heart of the spell began to beat. Heat washed across Dorian's face, and he glanced through the twisting orange flames to see the Bull, eye closed, his brow pinched, a hand laid lightly on top of his knee. 

The hugeness of him was lit by the fire. His horns cast shadows on the snow, shadows that moved. He'd laid his axe out beside his twisted leg, and the straightness of the haft only served to accentuate how wrong the bend to his knee.

How the wind did twist. The lilting snarl of it sounded as a song, a child's taunt. What was it they'd used to sing in the Circle when he was a boy and someone had been caught out? The wind rose and fell like that. Something pot and something jar. Dorian's head ached where he'd struck it, but he knew better than to feel at the scabbing wound. 

The Bull rubbed his palm loosely across his distorted knee. A flicker, in the line of his mouth. Then it resolved into careful serenity.

Dorian let his breath out. No getting around it. He stood up from his crouch, dusting snow from his trousers, even as he knew it useless. He crossed to the Bull.

"Let me see it." 

The Bull's eye opened. Calmly he lifted his head. 

"You know how to set it?"

Dorian hesitated. "No." He rubbed his palm along his chin. "Healing was never my forte. But somewhere in your depth of experience with breaking bones must be something useful. Tell me how to do it."

Strain marked the Bull's voice. "Can't wait to get your hands on me, huh?"

His tongue moved quicker than his mind. Easily Dorian drawled, "Anything to make you scream," then curled the traitor tongue behind his teeth.

The Bull chuckled at this line. It seemed cruel to Dorian, that he should do so, now. Dorian hadn't forgotten how the Bull had gone so very still beneath his hands. "It's getting late," he'd said.

Dorian dropped his gaze. "If you're ready."

The laughter went. His mouth creased. The scars marring his face, handsome in its starkness, tightened, and the Bull laid both his hands in the snow.

"Ready."

He straightened his leg out best he could. The cap faced outward. The Bull instructed Dorian: hands on either side, one higher, one lower. Grip firmly.

Perhaps it was some childish need for one-upmanship that drove Dorian to say it. "Should I raise a shield?"

The Bull had closed his eye again. The end of his mouth twisted, and he shuddered very faintly, only once, before he made fists of his hands and pressed the knuckles into the snow.

"Maybe you should."

Dorian recoiled.

Illusory smoke from the fire wafted, rising and then pulling away, drawn off by the wind, as the sea air had taken the acrid stink of gaatlok, ignited, across the strait.

"I was only joking," said Dorian.

The Bull tried a smile. "So was I."

Dorian set his hands in place on the Bull's leg. A brief tremor coursed through the broad muscles under Dorian's hands; then the Bull stilled that too. All of him stilled. Only once more did he move, and that was to show his teeth as Dorian, without shield, twisted.

"That's the best I can do," Dorian said when he'd done.

The Bull exhaled shakily; he breathed in; he exhaled again and it was slow, calmed. His chest, naked as ever, rose and fell, rose and fell. Sweat lined it. That would freeze soon. Dorian knew enough of the cold to see that.

"Better already," said the Bull. "You must have that magic touch."

Dorian worked his tongue in his mouth. He traced the backs of his teeth. His mouth was sour with the taste of lyrium and dry, too, as it was ever dry after drinking a mana restorative. And the thirst.

The shelter insulated the fire; they'd a measure of warmth. If Estera and Vivienne had avoided the avalanche, or got out, then they'd be looking for them soon. Dorian knew what the Bull would say: they had to keep moving. There was a reason why they'd all gone out in a blizzard.

The wind sang cruelly, battering at the meager side walls of their shelter. Hand in the pot, hand in the jar. Someone's in trouble; they won't get far. The shelter's walls, the fire: the cold would still come for Dorian and the Bull. Snow piled loosely at the shelter's mouth, and the wind stretched long fingers where it could.

Shifting his legs only so, the Bull sighed. His wide, bare throat worked. The leather of his harness afforded some little protection.

Dorian reached to his own neck. The scarf wound tightly beneath his coat's tall collar. A minute, then, to unwind it. The fine-stitched wool rasped across his nape as he tugged the scarf free.

The Bull stilled when Dorian bent to hook the scarf behind his neck.

"Sheep wit." His fingers grazed the Bull's jaw as he wound the scarf. "What intellect compels you to go all but shirtless through the snow?"

"Got thicker skin than you humans." He held his chin up, neck stiff. Horns straight and clear.

"And a thicker skull." 

He knotted the ends and leaned out. The Bull's eye was dark: dilated. No compliment to Dorian. He'd a thin sweat at his brow. The cold would make much of that.

Looking at him, and resolutely not thinking of the last night any more than he'd thought of the pain in his head when he'd spell cast before, Dorian made a decision.

The Bull startled.

"Stay still," Dorian snapped as he settled more comfortably on the Bull's lap. "I've no desire to set your leg again." 

[](http://tinypic.com?ref=20p3hjo)

His nose brushed against the Bull's stubbled chin. The Bull blinked at him. His eye, so close, shadowed as Dorian blocked the light of the fire from reaching it, was a color like dark iron. The Bull's hands raised. They stopped short of Dorian's waist.

"Don't read anything into it," Dorian added.

The Bull cupped Dorian's waist in his hands. Perhaps the Bull stood two heads taller than Dorian, and perhaps his hands were the size of wagon wheels, but Dorian was comforted to learn the Bull could not in fact span the entirety of Dorian's waist with his hands. His fingers curled in to either side of Dorian's spine. The layers of Dorian's coat, undercoat, shirt, all dulled the sensation. Made of it something that could be borne.

"It's only because I don't want to freeze to death," said Dorian. "And I don't want your freezing to death on my conscience either."

The Bull licked his lip. Dorian's eyes flickered down. The Bull's lips had tasted over-sweet from the mead. They had slicked under Dorian's lips, then parted. Now the Bull leaned close, to share the offered warmth. His hands remained chastely positioned.

"You might relax," said Dorian to the Bull's wicked ear. "I've no designs on your virtue."

"Not worried about it." The Bull turned his head. The pointed end of his ear brushed at Dorian's jaw. "You're a good man."

Dorian huffed a laugh, a short "ha!" and the Bull slid his hand up along Dorian's back till his palm rested somewhere short of his shoulder, against the blade. 

The Bull's breathing steadied. Dorian, too, rose and fell. The wind, he thought. The wind. It was talking to them. Hand in the pot. The cold nipped at his naked nape, the skin there exposed as he bowed his head to the Bull's shoulder. 

The Bull stank of sweat and blood. Dorian set his hands on the Bull's shoulders and turned his brow to the Bull's jaw. The short hairs there scratched at Dorian's skin. He didn't mind it. The scratching grounded him. It kept him from doing something foolish.

The wind, thought Dorian. _Dorian's in trouble. He won't get far._

"I got you," murmured the Bull. Dorian saw little to be gained in arguing the matter. But it sat heavy in him, heavy on him.

5.

"How did you hurt your knee?"

The Bull hummed in his throat, thinking. He remembered some of it at the start: the scuffling sound as the sheet of snow moved down the mountain. Dorian's shout. The hand Dorian had thrown up at the snow, the hand he'd thrown out to the Bull. 

"You put up a barrier pretty quick," said the Bull. "Guess 'gently' wasn't one of your top priorities."

"Not that," said Dorian. "And you're welcome, by the way."

"Hey, I'm not complaining." Dorian was warm against the Bull, his face, shaded from the fire, again remote and beautiful, thick-boned and marked with fine detail. "Just commenting."

"What a selfless act! One might dare to name it heroic."

"I'll make sure to pass your notes on to Varric when we get back," said the Bull.

Dorian stirred. His hands moved around the Bull's shoulders, skimming along his back, over the scars and the leather of his harness.

"If we get back."

"Didn't figure you for a quitter."

"Hardly!" 

Indignation gusted across the Bull's ear. The skin that held the tip flat against his head tightened.

"But why summon the attentions of caprice?"

"Pagan superstitions."

"Spoken like a true heretic," said Dorian.

What joke could the Bull make of that? Tal'Vashoth. 

"Thought you were pretty full up with yourself," he said instead. "Best of your class."

"Don't underestimate me," Dorian said. "And you're trying to put me off again. How did you hurt your knee? Originally. Step in a nug hole?"

"Something like that," said the Bull. "Only instead of nugs, a den of Vashoth rebels."

"On Seheron."

"One of 'em had a honking bigass mace, probably tall as you," said the Bull, "she got a good whack in before I--" He stopped there. 

He'd driven his poleaxe into her throat and on back to the wall. Blood gurgling from her throat, welling around the metal: she called him blind, fool, _emptied thing_ ; then he'd snapped her neck. In his memory she looked like Adaar.

Her voice came to him clearly then, not Adaar's voice, but another harsher voice. Empty vessel. "What good is a hollowed tree for protection?" The Bull heard it in his ear, as if she'd time to say it before he'd cracked the fine bones of her neck in his hand. The cold was eating at his head. 

Dorian spoke then, and the Bull's memories scattered. 

"I have a scar; don't ask me where."

He mustered some lightness. "Where?"

Dorian ignored him. "When I was eight or so, a few of the older boys in the circle took exception to, ah--well, frankly, they didn't care for my obvious superiority."

"Nah," murmured the Bull, "must've been your humility put 'em off."

"They tied me down in the showers," said Dorian, as if he were to call the blizzard unseemly, "and hit me with a ruler until I bled. And then a few more times to make sure the lesson took."

The Bull tightened his grip on Dorian. He didn't mean to.

"It was a very long time ago," Dorian said, sounding amused. "They were all second sons anyway, and I'm only in exile."

The Bull felt Dorian's breathing; he heard it, and it was stronger, he thought, than the winter wind calling out. It was more important.

"Anyway," said Dorian again, "that was a long time ago."

"A wyvern almost bit off my dick once," the Bull said.

"What!" said Dorian, and he burst out laughing. He shook in the Bull's arms; that thick arse of his ground painfully against the Bull's thighs.

The cold didn't much bother the Bull then. He gripped Dorian's waist and said, "Hey--this is serious."

"I knew your sexual appetites were appalling--"

"This one wasn't a sex thing," said the Bull.

"This one?" repeated Dorian, delighted. "Was there some other encounter with a wyvern that _was_ a sex thing? Wait. Why am I questioning this? It's you. Of course there was."

The Bull grinned at Dorian's cheek. "Get your head out of the gutter, 'vint. Just 'cause all you humans are obsessed with fucking everything..."

"I'm not the one who's tupped every chambermaid from Antivan to the Korcari Wilds."

"Don't forget the stable boys."

"How could I ever?" 

Slowly the laughter was draining from Dorian. He breathed out, and the Bull heard it like a summer gust in his chilling ear. 

"Dorian," he said.

"So why is it," said Dorian, rather quiet, "that when I kissed you last night--"

"Dorian," the Bull said again. 

"I'd like to know why," Dorian said. "I think I deserve it. At the very least you could tell me why it is after all that talk about your door always being open, you practically jumped into the fire to get away from me."

"That's not what happened," said the Bull.

"Then what did happen? We shared a drink, we talked, I kissed you--"

"And I said no," said the Bull. "I'm not allowed to say no?"

"You could--I mean, yes, you're allowed to say no--"

"So what's the problem?" asked the Bull. "You thought 'cause I said yes to someone else, I'd say yes to you?"

Dorian laughed at this. It wasn't a kind laugh. 

"Ah," he said. "So that's it."

"That's not it."

"It's something about me that you don't like."

"I just said that's not it. Look..." 

He rubbed his own shoulder, brushing off Dorian's hand as he did so. Dorian pulled both his hands clear of the Bull.

No delicate thing, Dorian. No frail or fragile creature. His jaw was square and set at a hard angle.

"You don't need pity," said the Bull instead of what he'd meant to say.

"Suddenly you get to decide what I do and don't need?" said Dorian, all polite incredulity. "My needs are a priority to you? Is _that_ why you wanted to go with Vivienne this morning instead of me?"

"What does it matter?" the Bull asked. "You want to screw somebody, shit. Take your pick. Plenty of guys around Skyhold'd love to give you a tumble."

Dorian folded his arms across his chest. 

"But not the Iron Bull, famed lover of all."

Silence, then. Silence but for the blizzard's crooning. Dorian still sat in the Bull's lap, yet a great distance was between them. The Bull's fingers dug into the snow.

Dorian had leaned across the tent they shared and grasped the Bull's jaw in his hands, long fingers cupping his ears, and kissed him hotly on the mouth. And the Bull had wanted to fuck him. He had, very much so. How could he not? He knew how Dorian laughed, how he walked, how his brow creased when he read Varric's books in secret, how he noticed before anyone else did when Estera was upset. How sweat moved along his throat. The thickness of his fingers, rings stacked on each knuckle.

He could have fucked Dorian. He'd thought of it once or twice. What Dorian would say if he ever did come to the Bull: what he'd ask for, what he wanted. What he needed.

Then Dorian had come to the Bull, and the Bull had said no, and now they were sitting here in the cold and the dark, on a fucking demon hunt.

"You deserve something good," said the Bull.

"Fuck what I _deserve_ ," said Dorian in a low voice.

The Bull thought Dorian might kiss him. The fire behind him was roaring; it towered; it shone behind Dorian so that Dorian looked like he was something more than man, something greater than flesh. He'd left his family, his home, his title, to flee the man his father would have made him. Someone ought to love him. Someone ought to take care of Dorian. 

And what was the Bull? Tal'Vashoth. The heretic. It was madness behind Dorian, beyond the fire. 

If Dorian kissed him, how was the Bull to say no again? 

Kiss me, the Bull thought. The thought came ugly-formed, clawing at his chest. His body ached; he was broken and weak; he wanted Dorian to kiss him. Kiss him and take him, it didn't matter. He would only that Dorian did it.

The Bull said hoarsely, "We need to get out of the storm."

Dorian swallowed. He nodded once. Then he stood, rising from the Bull's lap. His hands went to the buttons of his coat. 

"Dorian--"

"I don't want you to freeze while I'm putting up flares," Dorian snapped. He pulled the coat from his arms and bent, rich lips pressed thin, to tuck the coat around the Bull's bared chest.

"Dorian," said the Bull.

Dorian's eyes closed. His hands lingered at the Bull's sides, his palms so very light over the cloth of the coat.

"What?" 

"Thank you," said the Bull.

Dorian laughed again, joyless through his nose.

"You know," he said, "I'm beginning to resent the weight of your gratitude."

"You should heat that bottle now," the Bull said shortly. "Shore up your magic."

"Thank you," said Dorian, "for your consideration."

6.

He walked out past the fire, not far but enough that the cold stung his numbing face, cooling his skin. No reason at all to feel warm in such unpleasant weather; yet humiliation sat hot in his gut.

Dorian crouched to draw the sigil in the snow with his little finger. Small flakes stuck to the fine leather of his glove. The tracery left a raised circle in the midst of the glyph. He murmured _acendo_ and pressed his palm flat to the snow. Like guiding a trickle of water: he pushed the magic down his wrist and through his palm into the snow. 

Light coursed out from the center along the channels cut in the snow, and the flare lanced through the storm, a brilliant column of red light that cut through to the clouds somewhere far above. Dorian stared up at the unseen night. The flare lasted ten seconds, then he drew his hand back. He waited two minutes, the feeling gradually going from the end of his nose, and then he touched the circle again. Ten seconds. He sat back.

The Bull cleared his throat. "About what you said."

"Pretend I didn't say anything." Dorian's teeth ached. He went on staring at the sky, an afterimage of the flare burnt into his eyelids. "I hit my head. We're both exhausted. It was a moment of weakness. And so on. The grown up thing would be to ignore anything happened."

"We should talk about it."

"Because it went so well the last time," said Dorian. "Why not schedule a second go at it?"

The Bull sighed. "I just don't want you to have something else to regret."

"A smidge late for that, don't you think?"

"You're lashing out right now because you're embarrassed--"

"Oh, no!" said Dorian. He slapped his hand to the circle again, summoning the flare. "What's so embarrassing about coming right out and asking, 'why won't you fuck me? What about me is so--'" 

He cut off. The spit on his teeth, bared, dried in the cold. That fucking wind, he thought.

The Bull shifted. Dorian glanced to the side, to the weird shadow made by the Bull's horns against the bank of snow.

"I'd fuck you," said the Bull. "If that's what you really wanted."

Dorian laughed, helpless against it. "Oh, what I really wanted. What I really wanted! Maker! Why are we talking about this? And what was it I wanted last night?" Dorian turned on him. "A bedtime story? You weren't forthcoming with that either."

The Bull looked at him across the fire. Dorian's heart moved. Exhaustion marked the Bull.

"You want somebody to love you," he said.

Dorian said, "That," and sucked in a breath that caught in his throat. He was frowning; the muscles in his cheeks hurt with it; he could hear his idiot heart thumping, the blood made loud in his ears. He swallowed; he'd nothing to swallow. 

"That is wholly unrelated. And even if I did--" He stumbled on the if. The ends of his ears were numb from cold. All of him was numbed. He flung it at the Bull like a handful of fire. "Why do you think I'd want that from you?"

"You don't," the Bull agreed. 

He made no protest, gave no suggestion that Dorian had wounded him. He was in fact still, elbows bent and hands in his lap, legs stretched out before him, the good one and the one Dorian had clumsily set as the Bull took deep breaths and bit his lip against the pain.

Dorian's lips parted. He shaped a word and held it then let it slip to his gut. In the end he did what he had always done and that was to cut before he was cut again.

"You think," said Dorian, "that you know everything there is to know about people. But I don't think you know anything at all about yourself."

Firelight flickered across the Bull's face. Dorian's green coat was rumpled over his thick gut. His arms tensed.

"I know what I am," said the Bull.

"And what's that?" asked Dorian. "A weapon? Complete with the impersonal article? You can give me the speech again, if you want. I'm sure I've forgotten some part of it." He was warming up to it now. "It must be a great relief. Not having to shoulder any of the responsibility."

The Bull's eye had settled dully on the fire. Now he raised his gaze. For a long moment they looked at each other, then Dorian turned again to the fire. That light was easier to bear.

"I apologize," he said. "That was cruel of me."

The Bull breathed, ragged and deep. "You didn't lie."

"It wasn't true," Dorian said, "it was a terrible thing to say, and I said it to hurt you." He couldn't stop it now. Not now the Bull had begun. The Bull, too, looked to the fire, and whatever he saw there held him.

"It was easier," said the Bull, in his low and scraping voice. "When it was true. The lying." 

He paused there, long enough Dorian wondered if he'd ended. Stealing a look, Dorian found the Bull struggling: his jaw worked, his cheeks tensing then easing, as he looked for the words. He didn't want the Bull to tell him; he didn't want to carry this weight either. 

"It was easier," said Dorian. "When you didn't have to choose."

The Bull's jaw stuck out. He nodded.

"But you had to choose," said Dorian. "In the end. And now you have to live with it. Same as the rest of us."

"Not like the rest of you. I'm Tal'Vashoth," the Bull told him. "You know what I'm shaped for. And now I have to _live with it_. And there's no qun to make it safe."

The snow wetted Dorian's knees through his trousers. He ought to stand. He ought to turn his attention again to the flare. Soothing the Bull's identity crisis wouldn't save them from the storm.

"And?" Dorian asked. "You're the Iron Bull. You said it yourself, didn't you? The Iron fucking Bull."

The Bull's face creased. His hand twitched in his lap. "Qunari without the qun--"

"Do you remember what you said to me?"

Cut short thusly, the Bull said, "What?"

"After Redcliffe," said Dorian. "After..." He made an abortive gesture meant to indicate: his father, the argument, the night of horrible drinking that had followed. "Do you remember?"

The Bull said, "Yeah," slowly.

"You said it took a tough man to walk away from everything he loved."

The Bull leaned his head back. His horns pushed into the snow. His eye looked to the sky. What he thought he might find there, Dorian couldn't say; there was nothing but snow and darkness.

"I remember," said the Bull lowly.

"So," said Dorian, "good on you."

The Bull pushed the breath out through his nose. "Good on me," he echoed, as Dorian had echoed. He looked to Dorian. The lines by his eye softened. "Yeah. I remember."

"Well," said Dorian. "Try not to forget it. I don't want to have to tell you again."

A pained smile flicked the Bull's lips. "You just told me some shit I said."

"Forgive me for being occupied with saving our lives."

"All right," said the Bull. 

In small fractions Dorian pushed his magic into the earth, lighting the sigil. That he would eventually be unable to light it had occurred to him. Beyond the signal nothing but snow showed, snow furiously filling the air till there was no room left for anything else except perhaps the wind that drove all of it onward to chaos.

"Something fucked up about the wind," the Bull said. "Sound it's making. Like it's singing."

"If we're lucky," Dorian said, "Estera and the Lady de Fer will find us before it does."

"Demon," the Bull ventured.

"Oh, yes," said Dorian.

"Shit." The Bull glowered. "Fucking demons. Always have to shit on a nice night out."

Dorian said, "And it was so relaxing an evening," and again returned to the signal. His fingers trembled in the cold. They'd trembled for a long while by then. 

The Bull spoke again.

"I should've said yes."

Dorian looked at him in surprise. 

"Last night. To you." He grimaced. "Don't know why I didn't. Except that..." But he only shrugged.

The first flush of anger had passed; it took much of the embarrassment with it. He could have pressed the Bull for a real answer. If he'd any opportunity to get the truth out of him, this was it, when the Bull was quiet and worn. Dorian cleared his throat.

"We're both adults here. I'm--" He rolled a shoulder and ran a finger along his upper lip. "Well, I'm sorry for bringing it up. When you're inconvenienced."

"You could make it up to me," said the Bull. "Buy me a drink."

"If we survive," Dorian countered, "you can buy me a drink. My choice of vintage."

The Bull's mouth crooked. The scar lining his cheek bunched, the thick flesh folding in two places.

"Trying to bankrupt me."

"I haven't forgiven you yet."

Testing, the Bull said, "For not fucking you." 

"And you owe me your life," said Dorian. "Surely even a Tal'Vashoth respects that."

The Bull inclined his head, acknowledging the point. The long, distended shadow cast by his horns nodded. So they'd peace at least if not resolution. Dorian supposed he wished he hadn't kissed the Bull, but the expectation of regret was hollow.

He returned to the flare. At regular intervals he sent it out, and as he sent it he sent with it a prayer to the Maker, god with eyes cast away from creation. Let us be seen. Let us be found.

The night closed around them. The wind was noisome; it had lost its song; it grew ever louder, and the fire Dorian had made would not hold forever. Something would give. The unpreventable passage of time would make sure of it. Sooner or later everything gave.

7.

By the fire they shared a meager meal, supplied from pouches on the Bull's belt. A hank of dry bread, a sour cheese meant to crumble but frozen through, several grapes crushed by the long fall.

The Bull cracked the cheese in two and gave half to Dorian then, at Dorian's flick of a hand, the other half too. He was mindful their hands did not brush.

"We're going to have to move soon."

Heat radiated from Dorian's closed hands, through the fine leather of his gloves. When the cheese had thawed, but not melted, he handed the Bull the large share.

"You need it more than I do, big fella."

"And listen to your stomach moan?" 

Dorian presented his profile to the trade. He did however accept the offering of several iced grapes, to suck on and then to chew.

The Bull held his tongue. He too could feign normalcy. What was one more small weight? Grunting, he shifted his hurt leg.

"How's your footsies holding up?"

"Better than yours. How would we travel through this?" Dorian looked about, from the whited sky to the furious rain of flurries, driven sideways beyond their shelter by the wind. The bank by the shelter's mouth needed flattening. "You can't see past your nose out there."

The Bull shrugged. The ache in his shoulders had dulled. Numbed, more like.

"Use that barrier trick of yours."

Dorian chewed, thinking. "It could work. But I wouldn't have the mana to spare for anything else, if I'm holding that up." He pointed to the Bull. "You're as good as crippled--"

"Hey," said the Bull.

"If something should attack," said Dorian. "Demon or otherwise. All we'd have would be that barrier trick of mine."

"Barrier would keep the demon out."

"For a while, yes," said Dorian, "but eventually it would break."

"Not one of yours."

Dorian looked, fine brow furrowed, at the Bull. The blood had long since dried to a rusted smear along his dark cheek, blown back across the ridge of bone and over the black mole by the wind as they'd walked, heads bowed, through it so long ago. 

"That's..." His mouth pursed then pulled to one side. He resumed picking at his ration. "Certainly a vote of confidence. But even I can't cast a spell forever."

"So, what," said the Bull. "We stay put? Wait for it to come chew on our asses?"

Dorian muttered something to his handful of bread crust. The Bull pretended not to have heard. Easy, with that wind shrieking.

"What was that, Dorian?" 

He wanted Dorian to say it louder, that line about the Bull and open doors. Nothing was ever really over and done with Dorian. The Bull supposed he could let it go. 

Dorian brushed crumbs of cheese from his gloved palm. He was all regality again.

"I said--"

The fire blew out. From up the mouth of the shelter the wind came, and the light was gone. Dorian swore and, stretching one hand out with the palm lit like the moon, reached out with the other hand for his staff. He caught the Bull's arm instead. 

In the mouth of the shelter, something dark of form stood, and it existed only in the spaces between the snow flakes, and in the eddies of the snow's movement, and its eyes were cold as death and its arms beyond number and the shape of its splitting mouth impossible. That mouth split again, like the opening of a flower: it sang the wind at them, and the stink of thawed and rotting meat rode on it. 

The Bull tossed Dorian the staff and grabbed for his axe. 

The demon poured through the shelter's entrance, oozing through like a wet current. Dorian lit the darkness once, twice, again, glyphs that sparked the air and then vomited fire at the suggestion of motion. 

He heard it, clear as if the memory spoke in his ear: How do you know, Tama'? How do you stop it? 

The Bull struggled to his feet. The knee buckled, and he drove the haft of the axe into the snow to keep from falling. The whole of the blizzard seemed to push into the small shelter they'd made. Electricity stung the inside of the Bull's nose. 

"Dorian!" he roared. "Sound off!"

Lightning ripped through the air. The stench of it drove him to his feet. Fuck the knee. What if it takes you, Tama'? 

The Bull waded into the storm. His weight cast heavily to the side. 

"Dorian! Where the fuck are you?"

A long tongue curled around his left ear. He felt claws in his throat, and the familiar sweet warmth of Tama's rough hand stroking his head. 

"Ashkaari, be strong," she crooned to him, "our ashkaari, you must protect us from the bas saarebas."

He drove his fist blindly to the left. Teeth, splintering. The skin broke along his knuckles. Tama' laughed and pushed at his back with countless twisting feet and stepped off him and into the darkness. The storm swallowed him. He was ground into the crust of snow, deep into the embracing cold.

"Abomination!" "The abomination!" "Hissrad, do you see it? Hissrad--" "What did you do to them?" "Did you kill them?" "Did you see it, ashkaari?" "Mage, mage, I want the mage--"

Too many voices, all of them screaming in his ears. The snow clawed at the Bull's face, and he held his axe up so the great polished head of it protected him. Fire, in the distance: flames that radiated from a broad hand made thin by the strength of the light: Dorian illuminated in brief slivers, a strange thing, far from the Bull, at the center of the madness.

"Kill it, kill it!" "Where were you? Please!" "I saw the children burning, I saw them crying--" "Hissrad!" "Ashkaari!"

"I saw you do it!" Gatt shouted at him. "I saw you burn the children, they were on the boat, the children that burned--"

"That wasn't me," the Bull blurted. "It wasn't me--I never hurt any kids!"

"The boat in the harbor--" "Ashaad, karasaad, karashok, karasten--" "They burned, they burned--" "You didn't stop it, Hissrad. You let it happen." "Vashoth." "Tal'Vashoth." "Basra!" "Child-killer!"

He wanted to lash out. End it. Make it stop. He could not do it. He would not hit Gatt. He'd hit Tama'; he'd struck her; he felt the blood on his hand from her jaw, from her shattered teeth, Tama', Tama', _I didn't mean it, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to do it, Tama', please, I just want to keep you safe._

"Bull!" Light, in the darkness. It stung his eye. "Sound!"

Tama' petted his horns. "Ashkaari," she said. "Our ashkaari. Look how big you are. Look how strong. You must protect us."

"I can't," he said, "I can't do it."

He could not stand. His leg would not let him. If he couldn't stand, he couldn't fight; if he couldn't fight, he couldn't protect them. 

"Iron Bull! Sound now!"

"You can," said Tama', "you will. You must. You must kill the bas saarebas," she said to him, "our ashkaari who protects us."

"Abomination," said Gatt. "Bas saarebas!" 

"Give it to me," whispered Tama', "give me the creature and you can save all of them. I will have it. Give me the bas saarebas."

Ashkaari said, "I--"

Blistering heat rolled across his flesh. He threw himself away from it, onto his back, into the snow, his arms before his face. 

"Bull!" The man who came through the heart of the snow was incandescent; his flesh burnt; he was coated in flames like a dragon of old. "You idiotic--you can't possibly mean to leave all the glory to me!"

Long fingers of ice dug into ashkaari's emptied eye socket. They wormed along the scarring, pricking at his skin.

"Give me the mage!" Tama' screamed. Her jaw cracked. Half-frozen ice poured like blood from the seams of her bones. "Give it to me! Give me the bas saarebas!"

He said, "The--the bas saarebas--" but that wasn't its name. Dorian, ashkaari thought, its name was Dorian. 

The mage said, "For God's sake, Bull, I can't do this alone," and then he gasped, the mage did, a startled sound, and ashkaari said: he said:

"Get the fuck off me!"

The Bull snapped his legs up. His feet punched through the corpse clinging to him; it burst like a sack of over-ripe druffalo meat. The wind screamed and tore at him.

"Dorian," he tried to yell. His leg was fucking gone, he thought. Just fell right the fuck off at the knee. "Dorian!"

"I'm right here, you bellowing--" 

Gloved hands ran over the Bull's face, and in the darkness he made out the shape of another's face: a long nose, a broad jaw, high cheeks and a furrowing brow: Dorian's face. His name was Dorian. 

"What were you doing?" Dorian demanded. Roughly he felt the Bull's head, checking for injuries. "Just sitting there on the ground like that! The damned thing's regrouping, I don't know if it even has a corporeal form--" 

"Corporeal," said the Bull.

It was worry made Dorian so aggravated. 

"Yes! Corporeal! It's a fancy word that means it has a body--"

"Like you." The Bull covered Dorian's wrists. He'd a pulse in them, a heart beating somewhere in that strong chest.

"Well, I'm not a demon yet, and I don't intend to be any time soon." Dorian pulled. The Bull held on to him. "Do you think you could stand, before it makes another go at us?" 

"Think you could quit giving me shit for a minute?" asked the Bull. 

"Excuse me!"

"Nah," said the Bull, and he leaned up to press his mouth to Dorian's. The moment was fleeting. Dorian was still beneath the Bull's kiss. He drew breath in through his nose. Dorian's mouth was warm, warm as the last gleaming coals of a doused fire.

[](http://tinypic.com?ref=34pb8ms)

"That--what--" 

Dorian mouthed, speechless, then made one of his many inarticulate, angry noises.

The Bull cupped Dorian's cheek. "I owe you a drink," he said.

"Futete!" said Dorian. "This is when you--of all the absurd--and stop smiling like that!"

"I'm not smiling."

"Like a cat that's pissed in your shoe."

"You're so nasty," said the Bull.

"And let go of me," said Dorian, "unless you've forgotten we're fighting for our lives at the moment!"

"Mm. Okay," the Bull said, "that's a good point. Help me up."

Dorian heaved and the Bull managed to get settled on the one foot. The other resisted all attempts to put weight on it, and he leaned heavily on his axe as a crutch. 

"I got a couple hits in on it."

"That's because it concentrated on you." A frown marred Dorian's features. "I was taking shots at the wind."

The wind was steadily picking up again. Dorian's hair ruffled, obscuring his eyes. He swept irritably at it.

"Don't suppose you could get it to stick still long enough to knock it down for good."

Dorian shook his head. "None of my specialties--well. I could try a summoning, but..."

"Demon," the Bull finished.

"It isn't a chance I'd like to take, no," said Dorian.

The Bull brushed a few loose strands of hair back from Dorian's brow and told him, "I wouldn't want you to take it either."

Dorian said, "Well--then you just stick close to me," and he let the Bull trace the crease of his eye before, flustered, he pushed the Bull's hand away. 

The Bull said, "I'm not going to hurt you, Dorian," very quietly.

"Oh--so I can keep an eye on you," Dorian snapped, "I didn't mean so you could kill me. Who do you think I am? That a paltry little spirit like this could threaten me?"

"If it did--"

"I'd cut my throat," said Dorian. Then he added, as though it were obvious, "Same as you would, if it came to it. Now if you don't mind, could we please--"

The Bull caught Dorian's arm, and Dorian came back that small half-step to him. It was important, the Bull thought, that he tell Dorian. That Dorian should know.

"Dorian," he said.

"Iron Bull," said Dorian, warily.

The Bull rubbed his thumb along the thick, sturdy swell of Dorian's biceps. "You--" Thank you, he wanted to say; though Dorian had turned so angrily from the Bull's gratitude before. 

He took a breath to start again.

8.

"Can it wait?" Dorian interrupted.

The Bull had the temerity to look exasperated. "Can you let me finish?"

Dorian opened his mouth to tell the Bull exactly why he could not in fact allow the Bull to finish. His explanation was lost in the roar of the wind, the scream of it: the demon had finished marshaling its resources.

"God damn it," said the Bull, "I'm trying to talk here!"

"Yes, yelling at it will definitely devastate it!"

"Why are you yelling at me?"

Dorian ignored this. "Incendio!" 

He raised his staff like as an extension of his arm, and the magic flowed from the pit of his belly along the great artery of his arm along the staff and into the focusing gem at the end. The glyph flickered in the air; fire screamed out from it in a torrent.

The demon snapped and snarled, twisting away from the fire. It scattered into disparate flurries then regrouped. The Bull, making a pained sound in his nose, hefted his axe and swung at it. The blade passed through it like through air, but Dorian was there to fill the gap with lightning.

The forked hand lanced through the demon: it was shaped and limited, filled with light. The scream it gave resounded, enraged. Like thunder, deafening Dorian. He staggered. The Bull, his leg trembling, bolstered Dorian on his shoulder.

"Cock-sucker!" the wind screamed in Dorian's father's voice. "Come-shitter! Cut your throat! Slit your tongue! Piss blood, that's the only magic you can do, but you're too full from fucking to taste it in the blood!"

Dorian gasped. His breath shook with it. Halward stepped through the lingering outline of the demon. He sneered.

"It's not real," the Bull said in Dorian's ear, "it's just fucking with you. Did the same shit to me, but you're a better man, Dorian, whatever it's saying to you--"

"Do you suck his cock and hope one day he'll love you?" A slithering mockery of his mother's light pattering speech: "Oh, Dorian, darling, you know he's only using you, don't you? Men only ever want one thing, and they can only ever offer you the same." "Do you think anyone will ever want you?" "Beasts don't love, darling dear, they haven't brains enough for it." 

"You could make him love you," the wind murmured to Dorian. "You could make him do it. He'd love you forever and ever and never would he leave you. You're so much better at magic than your father ever was."

The Bull said, "Fight it!" 

"He'll leave you," said Halward in his grief, "idiot boy," and he held his hand out to Dorian and Dorian in answer held out his own hand and said, "Incendio."

The demon screamed. The Bull laughed, half a roar, and pushed Dorian forward as Dorian swung his staff through the flames at the smoking shadow of its skull. A wet noise sounded. 

"You're going to have to try better than that," said Dorian, panting with the exertion. His gut had knotted, his tongue dried. He was parched and light-headed. "I've heard worse from the chantry sisters."

The head of the demon split, parting into eight long petals. Another twisting flower opened inside it, a bouquet of whipping tongues. Dorian grabbed for what magic remained in him. He found nothing. Nothing came to him. Dull stars blinked behind his eyes. So: this was it. All that clarity, all the defiance: it came to nothing.

The tongues reached to them. The Bull dropped his axe. Dorian heard the thump of it as it fell. Then the Bull threw his arm around Dorian's shoulders and pulled him to his chest, and Dorian thought: if this was it, then he was glad he'd the Bull with him. The Bull's heart beat once beneath Dorian's ear.

The Bull said Dorian's name. His lips brushed Dorian's ear. God damn it, Dorian wished he'd earned some of the shit the demon had spewed. Well, he wouldn't look away from the end. He'd see it through. 

What he did see was this: the demon reached for them with its tongue and then it stopped short. Something ran down its opened throat. A bolt of ice. The air cracked, as like a woman's footsteps across frost. The demon gagged. 

"Shit," breathed the Bull, "it's Viv. You did it, you got 'em," and he bussed Dorian's temple, his lips rough and scouring at the skin, as Dorian stared, dazed, at the next length of ice to lance the demon. 

This last exploded: the ice expanded within the demon so that it froze in place, whipping tongues pulled to agonizing stillness. It was crystal; it was clear; it was beautiful in its grotesquery. The beast moved. So faint a thing.

With very little fanfare, Estera Adaar leapt from the top of the snow bank and hip-slammed the demon into the snow.

"Fuck off!" she roared, her usual cry of war, and at last Dorian believed what the Bull had known, that they would live.

Estera brought her colossal hammer down on the demon's ice-coated head one time, two times, three times, four. So simple. Foul-smelling rot spilled across the snow. It melted through the crust in rivulets, a stinking map of some ungodly river.

All the voices went quiet, then, and they were alone, all of them, in the midst of a mild snow storm. The Bull said to Dorian's ear, "Think I'm gonna take a knee now," and he unwound his arm. 

Dorian, so abandoned, rooted his feet for balance. His head ached. He felt a melon, left too long in the summer sun. How impossible, he thought.

Their vaunted Herald planted her elbows on her thighs and grinned up at them.

"Well," said Estera brightly. "I think that's done for it. Phew, it stinks like the inside of a horse's ass."

"Darling Bull," said the Lady de Fer, walking lightly across the snow to them, "whatever have you done to your leg?" Her heels left delicate fans in the snow crust. "I let you out of my sights for a few hours, and you've nearly lost your feet."

"Dorian's fault," said the Bull.

"I rather doubt it," said Vivienne. Coolly she looked Dorian over. "He looks quite peaked. No doubt from looking after you, Bull. Quickly, dear--I think he's about to--"

Estera lunged to catch Dorian. 

"Whoopsy daisy," said Estera. She peered at Dorian. "You okay there, peacock? Lucky for you we saw your light show, hm!" Companionably she patted his shoulder. "You go ahead and rest now, don't you mind."

"How embarrassing," muttered Dorian. 

"It's only embarrassing if you let it be," Estera said comfortingly.

"Don't lie to the poor dear," said Vivienne. "Bull, I insist that you stay as you are unless you wish to see your leg parted from you! He's only mana exhausted. I assure you, there's nothing your axe can do for him that my potions cannot."

The world floated oddly. Dorian clutched for Estera's hand. She grasped his fingers in her palm and leaned forward.

"Tell the Bull--"

The Bull's voice came from far away, it seemed, so very far away. What the bastard was doing over there where Dorian couldn't protect him, he didn't know.

"I'm right here, Dorian."

"He's alive?"

"More alive than you are," said Estera. "What is it, Dorian?"

He pulled in a rattling breath. Some echo rang in his ear, _idiot boy_.

"Tell the Bull..."

I wouldn't have minded it, Dorian thought. Dying, if the Bull was there with him. He was fading anyway.

"Stay still, I won't tell you again," Vivienne scolded.

"Hey, Dorian," the Bull shouted, "you're not crapping out on me, are you? You Tevinter cream puff?"

"Tell the Bull," Dorian said to Estera, "he can go shit in the Void."

"He says you can go shit in the Void," reported Estera, half-singing it.

The Bull laughed, and Dorian smiled, pleased, at that rough and living noise, even as the spots took up his eyes. 

"That's my smart-mouth son of a bitch."

"My mother is hardly," said Dorian faintly but with true insult; that was the last he managed. 

Not Aquinea but his father waited for him when he slipped into the greater darkness.

9.

Vivienne ducked through the healer's tent's opening, the canvas flap held aloft on the back of her wrist. Even in the midst of the snow and the mud, or stooping with her head bowed low to keep from catching her wimple on the canvas, she was elegant. The Bull, leg reset and bound, straightened with a wince.

"Oh, no need to stand to attention." 

She wafted her hand. The canvas closed behind her. But a glimpse of slowly drifting snow showed.

"Not on your account?"

"On my account? Always."

She took a seat on the chair beside his short bed. One of the healers had been forced to place a table at the foot of the bed so his feet didn't stick off the end.

"But I should hate to see so striking a man crippled. No, on this occasion, we may forgo formalities."

"That mean I can call you Viv?"

Vivienne smoothed her skirts over her knees. "As I said, I should _hate_ to see you crippled." 

As cleanly as she'd smoothed her skirts, she reached across the Bull to more firmly tuck in the sides of the sheet. The Bull abided.

"Ah," he said. "Gotcha, ma'am. Still white as your britches out there?"

"Never presume to know the color of a woman's petticoats." Amusement quirking her brows, she sat back in the chair. "The worst of the storm has passed, now that the corruption is eradicated."

"Hm. That's good. Glad you guys showed up when you did," he said. "Demon kept trying to--bargain with us. Least, I assume that's what it was trying with Dorian."

"Yes, it was too..." She twiddled two fingers in the air. "Material a creature to try a possession without permission. If you had been in better form it would have proved little challenge."

"Avalanche kind of knocked the shit out of me and Dor'," he said.

"Excuses," said Vivienne, resting those fingers by her cheek, "hardly becoming from an avowed champion," but the curve of her brows was nearly gentle. The line hardened. "You are very lucky to still have your leg. Much less your life. I do hope you didn't try anything especially reckless out there."

"Not especially."

"You do get a bit wild when people you care for are in, shall we say, discomfort."

The Bull flexed his toes. The muscles in the left leg clutched then, reluctantly, eased. He blinked owlishly. 

"Not sure what you're driving at, ma'am."

His shifting had rumpled the sheet. Again Vivienne stirred to straighten the sheet for the Bull, as a mother might check a babe's swaddling.

"Then allow me to speak plainly." He needn't allow her anything; Vivienne continued regardless. As she herself straightened she looked directly at the Bull. "Whatever it is that has made matters so tense between yourself and Master Pavus--no, you will let me finish, Iron Bull."

He subsided, stinging like his tama' had just swatted his hand for picking up rocks. 

"You are lucky to have survived. Both of you." She said this crisply, the _fools that you are_ left in silence but loud enough in the pause she gave it. "If you had been of clearer mind then perhaps you might have avoided being caught up in that avalanche in the first place."

"Couldn't have helped it," he countered, "we didn't exactly have plenty of time to get out of the way." Then, mulish, he added, "I asked boss to pair up with you for tracking."

"Most flattering," said Vivienne, "to be your excuse not to speak with Dorian. I shan't comment on the content of your shadow play." She ignored the Bull's muttered god damn it. "Nor shall I advise you as to what you ought or ought not do."

The Bull scoured his face with his palm. "Kinda wish you would. Don't suppose you'd be willing to play up the tamassran gig?" As a jest, it fell flatly.

"The Storm Coast is two months gone," said Vivienne. "You are Tal'Vashoth now. I am given to understand this is of great significance. But you are not, as I have witnessed, materially changed as regards the self." She held her hand up to him, forestalling protests. "You remain the same crude, roughly mannered, overly personal, and stalwart man--incorruptible and trustworthy--I have known you to be for the last year and half."

He made to speak. His throat was too sore. Instead the Bull swallowed roughly.

Vivienne chided him: "Surely you don't think every man in pain can resist the offers of a demon? Else we'd fewer offers of payment."

"You're going?" He looked up as she stood. 

She arched her brow. "You imagine yourself the only matter of import at hand?"

The Bull grumbled out a laugh. "Pretty sneaky, ma'am. Raise a guy up just to cut his legs out from under him."

A flickering smile touched her painted lips. "Only too easy, with what you've already done to them. Convalesce, dear Bull. The Inquisition has need of you."

He sighed and eased back to the head board. "Leaving me already. Damn. And here I thought the one good thing I'd get out of this was a gorgeous somebody wetting my fevered brow."

"Perhaps when Master Pavus has finished drooling into his pillow, I may send him to you," said Vivienne.

"You're a hard woman," said the Bull.

"With one or two regrettable soft spots," she said at the entrance to the tent.

"Viv." She turned. Her long fingers fanned across the lifted canvas. "Ma'am," he corrected.

She waited a moment. "Yes, darling?"

He meant to say something to her of Bastien, her lost duke. 

"Don't get any mud on your skirts," he said.

"Why ever do you suppose I wear such tall heels?" she asked, smiling. She let the canvas fall behind her. 

The Bull looked to her silhouette, striking through the light material; then she'd gone, and the shadows that crossed the canvas now and then were common shadows of common people, all of them breathing, all of them living. 

He dozed a time. He knew from the outset that it was a dream, or a fancy. He'd dreams like it before, always after he'd gone south. 

Tama' sat heavily on the side of the bed. Her back, turned to him, bent as she worked at the cloth in her lap. The hooked needle flashed as she tugged at a knot.

"Hey," said the Bull. He licked at his lips. They were dried, chapped from the cold.

"Where's the balm, hm?" asked Tama'. She did not look up from unraveling the outgrown shirt. "Did you forget to put it in your pack again?"

He uncoiled his fingers. They slipped along the cloth, nearer to her. He did not dare reach to touch the thick knob of her trembling elbow. 

Your pain touches hers, Cole had said.

"I'm sorry," said the Bull.

"Apologies are only words," said Tama' bluntly. "Do what is done. That will mend it."

The Bull closed his eye. His fingertips twitched on the sheet. He heard the rasping of the yarn, pulled from its weaving by Tama'. The bed dipped beneath her weight. 

"Can't fix it," he said. "Me leaving."

"If you could do it again," said Tama'.

"You can't change the past."

Tama' clicked her teeth. "So inflexible! Is that my ashkaari?"

"Nah," he said. "I'm the Bull now."

"Still my ashkaari."

"You're just a god damn dream," said the Bull tiredly.

"Have they converted you?" asked Tama', but she did not press. "Think of it as a question game. If you could have the choice of it again. What would you choose?"

"My guys or my people?" He said it harshly.

Tama' turned her head. Her eyes were dark, fathomless, marked with the strangeness of fever, or the unnameable depths of the Fade. The Bull stiffened. 

"What would you choose, ashkaari?" asked Tama'. "The thing that will ease you? Or the thing that will protect?" 

She lowered the needle to her lap, changing ownership of the tool to her other hand. He watched, unable to move, frozen by the pain in his arm, the pain in his leg, the memory of the demon twisting its long tongue in his ear, as Tama' lifted her hand to set it on his wrist. Her dark eyes did not blink.

"Would you give it up," she said, "to be at peace?" and her hand was ice, numbing upon his wrist.

The Bull could not speak. He did not think he could. His sore lips parted anyway. Rawly, he said, "Fuck off."

Tama' smiled, and her fingers as she slipped them from his wrist to the back of his hand were gentled. The horror that had filled him eased; but he was not sorry to have snapped.

"So it is," she said. "That is my ashkaari." Her fingers left him.

He said, "Tama'."

She said, "Sleep now, brave little fool."

He breathed in through his swollen nose. "Hey," the Bull said. "Look at me. Who you calling little?"

"Always little to me," said Tama'. 

She bent, then, to his great surprise, to kiss his nose between his eye and the great scar opposite it. 

"Brave fool," she said. "You hate the Fade but still you'll walk it, for them. Hm?"

His throat was thick. He said, "Are you really..."

"Sleep," said the woman with the black eyes, and she passed her cold hand over his eye, and he slept lightly till some scuffling noise outside the tent woke him.

Eventually someone else did come to see him. Their footsteps, hesitant outside, had startled him. The canvas lifted, rasping noisily. Not a healer, as he expected. 

The Bull swallowed his spit. He'd too much of it, snot too.

"Took you long enough," said the Bull, after he'd quashed the urge to hack.

"You wouldn't believe the weather," said Dorian. He let the canvas flap fall, resealing the barrier against the cold. "A man could get lost in it. I hear two or three have gotten turned around in it already."

"Slowed down a lot, from what I hear."

"Maybe you've acclimated. But I still remember sensible climes, where snow is a mage's first trick."

The Bull gestured magnanimously. "Come on in. Kick your feet up. Shake the frost out of your toes."

"I'm only stopping by on my way to speak with Estera," Dorian warned. He neared the Bull's bed but did not sit. "Reports to file. Maps to consult."

"You're gonna drink brandy, aren't you," said the Bull.

"And I'll hate every filthy, Nevarran drop," said Dorian piously. 

It was easy, slipping into the rhythm of teasing. Like pulling a blanket over his head. 

"That why you're here? To try and convince me you're drinking the boss' brandy to, what--protect the rest of us from it?"

"You joke but this is a true sacrifice I make," said Dorian. He hesitated though at the edge of the bed. "But I thought I'd swing by for another reason."

He could make it easy for Dorian, too. Give him an out, or another. Guide his responses to something that'd put him at ease.

"All right," said the Bull.

He'd apologize, the Bull thought. That was what twisted Dorian's lips. He'd apologize and the Bull would accept his apology, and they'd go on both of them with lighter shoulders. The Bull's shoulders knotted. His thumb creased the sheets on the far side, away from Dorian's dropped gaze.

"Thank you," Dorian said. "For." Tensely, he rolled a shoulder. "Well, for your support. Out there."

The Bull waited. 

"Yeah, sure," he said finally, "forget about it. Do it for anybody. So don't, uh, don't get your head screwed on too tight over it."

"That isn't--" The long muscles in Dorian's thick neck flexed. He cut his hand through the air, dismissive; then he clutched his hip with the same hand as he stared fixedly at the Bull's knee.

"I didn't mean to say that."

"You didn't mean to thank me."

"Not that way."

"By saying you didn't mean to thank me."

"Deus, adiuva me," Dorian muttered. 

"In Common," said the Bull. "My Tevene's a little rusty."

"How is it," asked Dorian, "that we could save each other's lives and yet here we are, at one another's throats again?"

"Hey, easy, big guy. I'm not at your throat," the Bull said.

Dorian made a frustrated sound and then covered his mouth. The last two fingers of his hand arched off his jaw, held straight as the others curled. He closed his eyes. The long lashes settled on his cheeks. He'd a wind burn, healing, along his throat.

"Ah," said the Bull, feeling at his neck. "Shit. I think I owe you a new scarf." It came overloud into the quiet. 

Dorian said, "I don't care about the scarf." Another long pause. "I care a little about the scarf," he admitted.

"It was a nice scarf," the Bull said. "What was it, hand-stitched?" Dorian sighed painfully. "Antivan merino?" It had smelled of Dorian's cologne. That was what the Bull most clearly remembered of it.

"You know it?"

"I got a pair of socks that're Antivan merino," the Bull said. "Probably too big for you though."

Again Dorian sighed. At the end of it, he lowered his hand. The temper had faded. Now he looked to the Bull with his eyes tired and creased with something thick.

"You don't owe me for the scarf. As it stands," said Dorian, "I suspect I owe you."

"Well, I suspect you don't."

"Did you hear it?" Dorian asked. "Any of it? What the demon said to me." The Bull shook his head minutely. "None of it bears repeating. But I do owe you, a great deal. It seems ridiculous to admit, having fought more pernicious influences, but I suppose I was weakened some by the, the fall, and the cold--"

"Dorian," said the Bull, and Dorian startled from his thoughts. "You're good. You're better than good."

The ball in Dorian's throat bobbed. 

Snow pattered against the canvas of the tent. Even with the heat given off by enchanted stones in the healer's tent, the cold seemed to infect the Bull's bones.

"At any rate," Dorian said. "I didn't want any awkwardness to continue between us. Because of my actions, or words, or."

"Consider it behind us," the Bull said. "Already hashed it out a couple times. I figure we're good. If you're good."

"And if you aren't?" asked Dorian softly, though his eyes narrowed as he looked up to the Bull.

"Me?" The Bull affected amusement. "C'mon, Dorian, you know me. I'm always good. Got my leg fixed up, got a nice warm tent all to myself... This is the high life."

Dorian snorted a dry little laugh. "Your standards are appalling."

"Hey, I'd like someone to feed me cheese and grapes," said the Bull, "but--" 

He remembered Dorian, breaking apart the frozen grapes and sucking them from his fingers. The words stuttered. He got them out. 

"Thick blanket's even better."

"I didn't hear any of what it said," Dorian said suddenly. "To you, that is. Or I heard it, only I didn't understand it. If you see where the river's going." He did. "But whatever it said, you know it wasn't true."

The Bull splayed the fingers of his left hand wide. The truncated joints trembled. The skin paled, at the ends.

"Some of it was true," said the Bull.

"Not all of it," said Dorian, brooking no other answer. "Not the worst of it."

"You telling me that because you want me to feel better," asked the Bull, "or to make you feel better?"

Dorian was still. Light from the lamp hung from the tent's apex slivered along the mean edges of Dorian's features. The Bull's thumb twitched.

"Shit," he said. "Sorry. That wasn't--"

"No," said Dorian, "it wasn't a particularly fair thing to say. But nor have I said many fair things to you of late. And none of this is what I meant to say to you, here, now."

Dorian's shoulders were taut. Well, the Bull was wiped, too.

"So then what was it you wanted to say?" he asked Dorian.

Dorian held his hands up. The rings on his fingers glimmered, each of them a tangled mystery of runes and old glyphs.

"Thank you," he said. "And that I'm sorry. That I'm glad, if I had to go through so wretched a night, it was with you. And I wish that things can be between us as they once were."

The Bull looked at him, at Dorian, at this fool man who called himself realist and played at pessimist. The fact of it was that nothing could ever be as they had once been because the reality of it was that Dorian wanted all the things humans wanted, promises and rings, but not of the Bull, and what the Bull wanted of Dorian did not matter. Dorian did not want it. He would not want it. No man could force the mountain to its knees, to see the horizon clearly.

"Yeah," said the Bull. "Me, too." Dorian tried to smile. The Bull said, "Hey--cheer up. I still owe you a drink, don't I?"

Small lines nestled at the outside corners of Dorian's eyes, and the smile he made was fleetly true.

"No," said Dorian, "I think all our debts are squared. Any future drinks, those will be simply friendly gestures. No ulterior motives whatsoever."

"Nice," said the Bull. "No more fucking up a stout ale with deeper meaning. Just beer for the sake of beer. That's positively Fereldan, Dorian."

"You don't think I'm adapting, do you?" Dorian mused.

"Dorian," the Bull said, grinning at him, "you start sleeping in dog kennels, then you can worry you're going native," and Dorian laughed and said, "If I ever, then you might as well ship me to the Korcari Wilds." 

"Korcari Wilds, huh," he said, "I hear they got places where it snows all year round. Never even see the sun."

"That's not true," said Dorian, "that's utter rubbish. Some southern lies. Even this impossible country must see sun at some time in the year."

"Would I shit you?" asked the Bull.

Dorian said, "When you put it like that," and the Bull thought: well. He'd been the liar before.

10.

Mountains again, ever mountains: Skyhold, that ancient fortress, cradled in the peak's ragged bosom. The triumph of their return went unnoticed for much of the climb. Dagna had a sturdy crew out maintaining the enchanted wayposts, legacy of a long gone elven empire, that kept the main road if not wholly clear then at least surmountable.

"Hardy workers, these," muttered Dorian. His feet blistered in their boots. 

"No need to disparage," said Vivienne, with a delicate flittering of her fingers. The white linen wrapping of her atora hung, tails sewn with beads. "Without their hardy work we might well waste the winter in the lowlands, amongst the nobility."

The naturally horned of their companions lingered at the rear, joined by the foot company that had accompanied them. The Bull's leg, its rejoining urged on by potion, magic, and splint, yet hobbled. Dorian looked to the road ahead of them.

"You mistake me, Madame. Theirs is a task I would not like to do."

"And to spend some months in the court, feasting on fine-boned birds, would not appeal to your rich sensibilities?"

"Do they still eat the bunting in Orlais?"

Vivienne demurred. "Only after removing those very fine bones. Civility does make demand." She'd mud crawling up the slick, water-sealed leather of her own boots. 

"A pity," said Dorian. "The marrow's rich."

"Is it not the splintering bones that appeals to your palate?" asked Vivienne. 

"Please tell me you lot aren't pecking again," said Estera. Dorian startled; as large as Adaar's bones were she moved as lightly as the bunting through the brush. "It's only another hour till we're home again, and I really don't want to put anyone into time out."

Vivienne, unruffled by Estera's sneaking up on them, pursed her lips. "My dear, whatever do you mean? We are only talking."

"A civil discussion of culinary traditions," Dorian agreed.

Estera glowered. "It sounded like knives sharpening to me."

"Ah, c'mon," said the Bull. He was slower to rejoin the party. The sling for his shoulder held the arm tightly to his chest. Someone had got a coat for him at camp some nights ago, and the sheep's wool lining stuck out at the collar to puff around his face. "Fancy southerners, they're not gonna tear into dinner with their fingers. Wouldn't be ci-vil-ized." 

He drawled it. The shape of the syllables rounded his lower lip. Dorian held his composure, though Vivienne's glance, sliding across him, carried a cool edge, like a knife well-sharpened indeed.

"Southerner!" said Dorian, his own glance sliding across the Bull and then Estera. "What an insult. Do you see what I put up with, Inquisitor?"

"Dear Bull," said Vivienne, as Dorian spoke, "what manners do you bring to the table?"

"I," Estera announced, "am tired of slogging through all this white crap. And I am too tired to translate any of this. So good-bye."

The Bull snorted, but his mouth was curved with fondness and the edge of his rough jaw gentled as he looked after Adaar, stomping her way up through the snow. His gaze lingered on her; then his eye dropped. A moment, then, as the Bull and Dorian looked at each other. The Bull's fingers, arm bound so tightly in its place, curled upon his breast. Dorian turned.

"I'll be glad to be indoors again," Dorian muttered. "Properly indoors. With an actual roof overhead, and walls to keep out the wind."

"Stop scratching at your chest, Bull," Vivienne scolded, "you'll scar crossways to the mark you already sport."

The Bull said, "I'm not scratching," then he grumbled some and said, "Yes, ma'am," doleful as a child caught teasing the cat.

A smart remark came to Dorian: How obedient you are when Madame de Fer speaks. If she asked you to jump from a cliff, would you take off your shoes before you leapt? His face stung with the cold; it had stung the whole of the venture. The whiteness of his breath fogged the air and, blown to him by the breeze, pricked at his eyes.

"Dorian, you needn't march so," said Vivienne. "We're but a half day's walk from a warm bath."

"I'd a warm bath sooner than night fall," Dorian said.

The tenor of the Bull's laugh, a chortle kept to his throat, sounded low and rough. He sighed after it, that as low, and said, "Shit. You put me in a warm bath, I don't know if I'll get up again."

"A warm bath would do wonders for your mending leg," Vivienne said to the Bull. "Your bad knee too, no doubt."

"What I need is to get some hands on them," the Bull said to Vivienne; his voice was directed enough now that Dorian knew himself, already distanced by the lead he'd assumed, to be excluded. "Knuckle down and loosen up the muscle."

"I'd offer but I've a strict hands off policy." Something like laughter lightened Vivienne's voice, though her tone was as sharp as ever. "Surely one of Cabot's finely trained young women might help."

Dorian bent his head and walked determinedly on, his feet dwarfed by the size of Estera's shuffling giant's tracks in the snow. The wind, at least, was no threat to them here, though it nipped. He was waiting to hear something else carried upon it.

"Nah," the Iron Bull said, far behind Dorian, "my hands are as good as any."

"But I do hate to think of you alone in the baths," said Vivienne, "whoever will help you out when your head grows faint from the heat?"

The Iron Bull's laughter carried to Dorian, even as the wind would carry it away.

And so, again, Skyhold: Skyhold, fortressed against the world, Skyhold, remote and untouchable, out of the grasping reach of foul spirits and whispering demons and a man's cruel past. So Dorian had thought once, stupid with hope that, after a lean year wandering half a beggar out of Tevinter, he could at last be more than the shadow of his father's name.

Estera allowed him to use her private bath, an over-sized tin tub set out in the middle of her room with no mind paid to the decor. Dorian told her as much as he undressed. The wretched clothes, he stuffed into a canvas bag; the fresh ones he hooked on the foot board to Estera's bed.

"Decor, ha!" said Estera, already fresh-scoured and dressed in the horrid pajamas she insisted on wearing about Skyhold. "Did you know the Bull keeps a cheese wheel under his bed?" She was fiddling with her whittling. 

Dorian, sinking into the heated water, said, "Why should I care to know what the Bull keeps under his bed?" The heat nearly overwhelmed. His stomach fluttered, turned over, with it. Steam ate his skin; had his face gone so numb? "How do you know what Iron Bull has under his bed?"

Estera shook wood shavings from her pen knife. In her large hands, the knife looked a toothpick. "He told me. I caught him sneaking a wedge out of Cabot's stores and I said hey!" She pointed into the air at some hallucinatory Iron Bull. "What are you doing sneaking out a wedge from Cabot's stores!"

Dorian leaned his head back against the tub's lip. The metal burned pleasantly at his nape. Maker, he thought as he looked at the rafters above, and he could see the expression on the Bull's face as he lifted the cheese wheel.

"Do you know what he said?"

He closed his eyes. "I can hardly imagine."

"He said," said Estera, snorting in her mouth, "that he'd heard cheeses needed aging and so he wanted to find out what would happen if he let it age longer."

"Under his bed," said Dorian. He was smiling at the thought. Ludicrous.

"That's what he said." Estera yawned noisily. Her jaw popped and she harrumphed in the wake. "Anyway. Do you know what I think?"

"What do you think?"

"I think he just really likes cheese," said Estera, "and he wanted a snack for at night. You know..." She hesitated.

The quiet persisted. Dorian stirred, slopping steaming water against the tub's sides. He looked over at Estera, standing before the spacious windows with her thumb rested against the edge of the knife. Her gaze had fixed on the night sky beyond the glass, beyond her reflection in the glass. Her horns, so unlike the Bull's, twisted as a ram's horns did, fat bone ridged and coiled against the sides of her head.

"Well," said Dorian, "as we've discovered tonight, I know very little."

She dipped her head. The edged nail, that pseudo claw, on the end of her thumb plucked at the knife's tip.

"I'm sorry we weren't there sooner."

"Is that why you're brooding?" Dorian laughed at her.

"I'm not brooding," said Estera, puffing indignantly. "I'm reflecting on how I almost lost two of my closest friends!"

"Were you the demon?" asked Dorian. "Did you try to kill us? No, don't answer. I can see you'll only fumble for your words."

Estera scowled, her broad face creasing into a pinching sort of pout. "Has anyone ever told you what an ass you can be?"

"Ah, yes," said Dorian sadly, "an unfortunate consequence of so often being the only person with the right perspective on things."

This, Estera would not dignify with a response but for a few wood shavings flicked at him. He whisked a barrier out of the water and they dashed wetly to the floor. Formalities concluded, Estera sighed and stretched her arms over her head. 

"I'm going to the tavern after all this," she informed Dorian. "Come with, hm? Sera'll be there."

"Sera's always there. She lives there. I suspect she might work there," said Dorian. "Extra coin on the side."

"Chargers will be there too," said Estera, "and Bull."

Dorian flexed his toes underwater. The sore knuckles cracked, and he studied the crooking of the joints through the water. 

"Mm, tempting as a hangover does sound, I'd rather retire with a good book."

"A dusty tome, you mean," said Estera, "probably written a thousand years ago in hobgoblin's blood."

"On vellum extracted from some poor darkspawn's back, yes," he said. "You do know your necromancers."

"I know many things," said Estera, "many things indeed," and she grinned at Dorian in a manner some might characterize as carnivorous.

"You needn't feel badly that you weren't there sooner," Dorian said, some time later as he dried his hair with a thick cloth. "We did survive, after all."

"You, empty as a pig trough, and the Bull with everything broken," said Estera sourly. "You're lucky to have survived."

"And if you'd been caught up in the avalanche, too?" said Dorian. He reached for his trousers. "You did come for us. The Bull said you would."

"He did," said Estera. 

He paused, hands on his trousers' laces. "He did," said Dorian. "And I knew you'd come. And so you came."

"Spare me the weight of your expectations," said Estera, but she was smiling. Jesting in tone, she said, dragging it out: "Do you know--"

"Assume I don't."

"You're stronger than you think you are," she said. "You should remember that. Braver, too."

"Strong?" said Dorian. His lips moved; he felt the fish. "That--" Swiftly, he recovered. "You underestimate how highly I hold myself in estimation."

"And I _know_ you know that I hate wordplay," lied Estera, and she tossed him the bit of wood she'd worked. 

Surprised, and shirtless, Dorian looked at it. "What is this?"

"Void's spit if I know," Estera said. "I was just fucking with the knife. It looks sort of like a halla's head, do you think?"

"If a giant sat on it," said Dorian. "Are these horns?"

"Well, they're something," said Estera. "Sure you don't fancy a drink? I'm paying."

Fetching up his shirt, Dorian slipped the wooden atrocity into the breast pocket. Firmly, he said, "I'm certain. But don't hold back on my account. I expect to hear you and the Bull locked horns." He forced it out lightly.

"That's disgusting," Estera said, "if I did that, Vivienne won't _ever_ give me a shot."

Dorian stopped. "You're--and Vivienne--"

"Good-bye!" said Estera loudly. "I'm going to get very drunk! And do nothing disrespectable at all! And wake up at a reasonable hour in the morning!"

"Two of those statements are among the worst lies I've ever heard," said Dorian.

"I can't hear you as I am leaving right now at this moment and please lock my door behind you with the spare key!" she yelled. "Thank you! I love you very much! Good-bye!"

Again, he was alone, alone but smiling again, smiling and then no more. The inquisitor's room, empty of his friend, sat heavy in silence. Dorian tightened his hands in the shirt then eased them, mindful of the embroidery in the rich cloth. The silence beat in his ears. He'd grown so accustomed to the wind's howling. 

Dorian faced the high windows, set to greet the morning sun whenever it should return to the mountains. He saw only his own reflection. A handsome man, yes, strong-boned and bath-tousled. 

He breathed in the lingering heat of the bath. The sharp scent of the candles Estera liked and thus hoarded. How easily she'd said it. He thought: how tired he was of it all. Wanting, not wanting, unwanted. 

The cold had chased from his bones, in the hot bath. Now it crept little fingers across his skin again. Wet drops slicked his nape; those chilled. He looked at the window and he saw himself, and he thought, as he had not thought, of the Bull's face beyond the ring of fire, the shadows marking his eye and the strange light that touched his jaw, and the soft rumble of his breath as he sighed when Dorian at last crossed to sit with him.

"Do you think what you want is more important than what you are?" his father had said coldly to him, once very long ago.

The wind rattled against the glass in its frame. It was only the wind. No other whisper worked through it. 

"And what am I?" Dorian asked his reflection now. He asked it unkindly, and he heard his father's voice in his throat.

Dorian spun from the windows. His bare feet slapped on the stone floor, and he jumped at a sudden pain: a wood shaving had splintered his toe. The pricking somewhat let out the steam in his own head, and Dorian, gripping the tub in one hand to set his weight against the basin, brought the foot up to his other knee so he might pick the wood from his foot. The splinter came readily, with only a little blood to show. That red bead, he smeared away with his thumb.

How many times had he crested the same hill? Every time he thought he'd come to peace with his father, and the realities of his own wants, sooner or later he had to start the process all over again. Each resolution he set wavered. 

Dorian turned the wood sliver between finger and thumb. The end of it had tinged red. It wasn't his father's voice that haunted him but his own voice. Nothing the demon had said to Dorian he hadn't already thought. 

So here he was again as he was always here. Nothing changed it. Nothing ever seemed to change it. Possibly he was doomed to wind up like so no matter what resolution he set or peak he surmounted. 

As he turned the shaving to and fro, his brow lowered in fractions; his mouth tightened. If it didn't matter, he thought, then why not do whatever he wanted anyway?

Dorian flicked the nail of his little finger against his palm, like striking a spark. The splinter ignited to ash; he shook it from his fingertips. Some mad, vengeful joy had started to rise from his gut.

Taking his dirtied clothes up in their canvas bag, Dorian stooped to collect his boots too. If he'd known he was to spend the evening at the tavern, he would have brought finer clothes to Estera's chamber. He'd need to stop at his quarters first. 

Dorian closed the door on those tall, dark windows. As Estera had asked, he locked the door before he left. He was happy to do it. A little thing to help someone else. That was Dorian, in his own estimation.

11.

The Bull waved off the expected teasing from the lads.

"Sure you don't need help getting outside, chief?" Krem called. He'd fussed earlier, at the Bull's return, over the splints and fresh scars. "Old leg up to the task?"

"Better watch the lip," said the Bull, "or I'll use you as a crutch."

"Krem's not sturdy enough," said Dalish, "you need someone thicker around. Like Rocky."

"Now, hey," said Rocky, "I'm flattered and all..."

"Rocky?" The Bull laughed. "What'll I do, strap him to my leg? He only comes up to here."

"Now, hey!" said Rocky.

Skinner set her mug on top of Rocky's hand. "Ought to lay down," she advised. As was custom after a long evening of drinking, her accent had grown two wool coats and a harvest of burrs. "Don't want you to ... fall."

The Bull squinted at her. "That a ... threat?"

She sipped at Rocky's mug. "Wouldn't want to ... break your face. In the fall."

"Is she threatening me?" he demanded of Grim. Grim shrugged.

"Not much of a face left to break," Krem muttered into the hank of bread he'd nicked from Sera's plate while she was off batting her eyelashes at Maryden to see if she could get the bard to recite The Ballad of Hardy Richard. 

The Bull rubbed his hale hand over his stubbled chin, to the hilarity of the surrounding tables. "You think it might give me a distinguished profile?"

"If you had any more of a distinguished profile, sir," said Krem sincerely, "your face'd walk off and start wearing leggings."

"Oi, boss," said Rocky, "I'm being harassed by elves."

The Bull, at last straightening from the table, slapped Rocky healthily on the back. "I gotta go whiz."

This garnered several groans, a few laughs, and one suggestion that he try to write out _Equal Pay for Equal Effort_ in the snow. 

"What?" said Stitches. "He's the bladder capacity."

"Yes, but can he spell?" asked Dalish.

"I'm disbanding the group," the Bull announced on his way out.

"That's abusive management!" yelled Scrugg, who'd come to at some point.

The Bull, chuckling, waved the lot of them away. He was chuckling yet as he moved aside at the Herald Rest's door, to let in a trio of templars in stiff leathers before he stepped out into the night. 

The cold pricked his nose, the back of his throat. The Bull rocked his shoulders as to shake it off. He tipped his head back to look at the stars; but there were no stars, not this evening, the gathering snow clouds too thickly made. 

He exhaled whitely, only to see the fog of his own hot breath as it chilled and whisked away on the mountain wind. His arm yet ached. He expected the bone would continue to ache for some months. Perhaps it would always ache. Another tally.

The Bull rubbed the knuckle of his thumb along his brow. The past was past. What was done was done. 

Someone else slipped out the tavern, and the Bull pressed his back to the wall so they, too, might pass him. In the gust of heat let out the door by their passing, he heard Maryden murmuring the first bawdy line of Hardy Richard.

The Bull laughed. "Good on you, Sera," he said to the overcast night sky.

"What's Sera up to?"

He was not surprised to see Estera at his side. Her distinctive stride left lopsided treading in the well-packed and dirt-marked snow. 

"Working on seducing Maryden," he said. 

Estera snorted. "She just wants a song about her tits." But however sharp the words, her tone made them gentle some.

"So you guys finally worked through it?"

Again Estera snorted as she crossed before the Bull to settle on his sighted side, where he might more easily track her. She fell in beside the Bull, pressing her back to the wall. Her shoulder came even with the upper swell of his biceps. 

"Good," said the Bull. "Hated seeing two of my favorite girls at odds. And not in a hot way."

"Stuff it sideways," said Estera. "That's what Sera would tell you, anyway." Her dark horns gleamed blackly, almost, in the light cast out by the enchanted lamps set at even intervals along the path.

"Hmm," he said, "that's what Sera'd tell me, huh?"

Estera grumbled in her throat. "Yes, all right," Estera said, "so you know, yeah, we've patched it up. Do you know," she added, turning on him, "it's very annoying how you always know these things?"

"Don't know everything."

"Bad as my mother," said Estera.

A year ago he hadn't known what to say when Estera mentioned, casual as anything, her mother, her father, the sisters she remembered one after the other. 

"Just call me Tama'," said the Bull. He stirred, turning to Estera as she had turned to him. "I never really got why it didn't work out. Between you and Sera."

Estera raised her bushy eyebrows high as they'd go.

"I'd have thought you knew before we did," she said, "since you know so much, huh!"

He spread his hand out in a shrug.

Estera settled again. "Well," she said. Humming, she scratched idly at the twice scarred base of her left horn. The scars, silver, ran counter to the natural grooving of her horns. 

Vivienne had teased she'd have silver chains made to lay like lace on Estera's horns, to make something useful of the scars. The Bull thought the scars were useful enough as they were, as a memorial to survival.

Estera exhaled. A white and smoking cloud shivered from her lips.

"I think," she said slowly, looking beyond the Bull's shoulder at the looming silhouette of Skyhold's great towers, "that we were just too much alike. In the end. But who knows?" She tipped her head side to side. "Sometimes it just doesn't work. Oh, well. That's the way of it, I guess!"

The Bull chuckled lowly. 

"What?"

"Nothing."

"No, that's something," said Estera. "Tell me. Don't just laugh and not tell me."

"Just thinking," said the Bull. "For a Vashoth born outside civilization. You sure got some Qun ways of thinking."

Estera flashed her teeth at him. "It's just sense, you know! You aren't still worried I'm going to go mad on you, are you? Because I've told you, that's a load of bollocks."

He folded his arm across his chest, to itch at the splinted arm where it lay, sweating, along his side. 

"Nah," said the Bull. "You were born outside the Qun. Into ignorance. You can't go mad, if you haven't turned your back to it. Like how..." He drew a heavy breath and let it go. "Mages see things we don't. And if you never see them, you're fine. But with mages, it's not the same."

Estera nodded. "That's bullshit. You realize, yeah?"

"You gotta let me finish," the Bull said.

"You're not going mad," Estera told him. "Not now or later. I'm telling you that for sure. If you were going to go mad, it would've been down in that valley. Yeah? But you didn't, did you? You kept your horns on and your teeth in and your brain in your head."

The cold picked at his skin.

"That's not--" He rubbed at his eye. "You aren't letting me finish."

"I don't have to let you finish to know it's bullshit," she said. "You know--you broke your leg and your arm down there, and when the demon came for the two of you, you kept fighting." 

"'Course we kept fighting," said the Bull hotly, "it was a fucking demon--"

She cut him off. "You know what Dorian said when I tried apologizing to him?" She folded and unfolded her arms. "For not finding the two of you sooner than we did?"

Nonplussed, thinking now of Dorian across the fire from him, the Bull said, "What did he say?"

"He laughed at me," said Estera. "And that's what I'm saying to you."

"You're saying Dorian laughed at me?"

"No," Estera said, poking the Bull in the shoulder, "I'm saying I'm laughing at _you_."

"What?" said the Bull.

Estera patted his arm. Her hand rested. "I'm getting out of this fecking cold," she told him; and she shoved off his arm. The Bull swayed without need to sway. She turned from him. "Round of drinks on me, if you decide to stop sitting out here feeling sorry for yourself."

The Bull said, "Hey," and Estera stopped with her hand on the door. She tipped her face to him. In the moment of her turning back to him, he discarded one question and then another. 

"Dorian gets an apology, and I get laughed at?"

Her nose pulled to one side, so dragged by the wrinkling of her mouth. She cast her eyes skyward in thought. Light from the lamp at his back caught on her grey face and in the grooving of her horns. 

"Do you know, I'm starting to think, saying you're sorry doesn't mean as much as not doing the thing you were sorry for? Maybe instead of always apologizing," said Estera, "we should just do better instead. I'm only paying for one round, though, so you'd best hurry!"

The tavern vented the collected heat of a hundred bodies, laughter, Maryden singing of Hardy Richard and his rooster cock, the scent of wood smoke, and a moment longer Estera stood there on the threshold. The light gilded her. She looked at the Bull.

"For what it's worth," she said, "I _am_ sorry." 

Then she smiled, a twist at one corner, and cast up her shoulder. Her horns bid her duck to fit the frame, an inconvenience only known to Estera and the Bull; and when she had passed through, the door closed behind her.

The Bull breathed deeply of the lingering wood smoke smell and stepped out from the wall to stand in the snow beneath the shadowing clouds. No stars. No moons. Again he breathed swellingly of winter. 

He missed it then. He always missed it. The humid summers. The sweet fruit Tama' kept in a clay bowl as a treat if everyone did as they were told. The thick red clay under his bare toes. "Ashkaari." The soldiers he had made of the other children, to command in their play. 

He closed his eye against it. He was breathing still. The cold dug into his throat, and he wished then, only for a moment, that he would never breathe winter again. 

"The past is the past," he whispered roughly, in Qunlat. The simple tongue. "What is done is done. Blah blah blah." A humorless snort of a laugh at this. "And blah blah blah, said Ashkaari."

He wondered if he would always wait for it, the madness. He wondered if it was like winter, and he would learn to live with it.

The Bull sighed. He opened his eye, turned up to the black sky. The clouds had opened at last. A snowflake pinched at his cheek, and there it melted. He brushed at the wetness. Absently, at a faint sound, the Bull turned his head just so to glance up the winding path.

A man picked his way across the snow, a tall, broad-shouldered man in a fine coat. The snow flurries, falling in silence, flashed as they came into the light of the lamps. A white halo seemed to illuminate the man from behind; then Dorian passed into the shadow that stretched between two lamps.

The Bull breathed steadily. His breath frosted. The beating of his heart, that was steady too. Dorian wore a new scarf, a red one tugged up against his cheeks. The Bull thought it might be a month or so till he could replace Dorian's lost scarf.

He waited, unmoving, till Dorian drew even with him. Dorian lifted his chin. His mustache was fresh-waxed. He smelled cleanly of soap.

"Not worried your hair's going to freeze?" asked the Bull.

The careful set of Dorian's jaw gave way as he gave a mirthless ha! "If it does freeze, then it will look immaculate," he said. "I didn't style it to have it freeze a mess."

"Be a shame if it all snapped off, though."

"Don't you dare touch it," said Dorian.

"Who's touching it?"

"Not you, certainly."

The snowflakes drifted sideways between the two of them: fat, white flakes that drifted gently to earth, and there the flakes stayed, their spindling arms overlapping. Dorian looked at the Bull. The Bull, hesitant, lifted his hand, and Dorian, in turn, lifted his chin, that the Bull might straighten the line of the scarf.

His hand dropped. Dorian's chin stayed hefted high.

"You look like a hound with your nose up like that," said the Bull.

"You smell like a hound," said Dorian, "I'm trying to keep my nose out of the way."

"Hey," said the Bull, "I washed."

Dorian made a doubtful noise, then they were wrapped up in the quiet snowfall again. The Bull thought: something had changed. He could not name it. Whatever resolution they had reached at the camp seemed long ago. 

"Nice, isn't it," said the Bull.

"That you washed?" said Dorian. "I should say so. In fact, I do say so. How nice that you washed, Bull."

The Bull grinned and gestured. "Not that. The snow."

Dorian followed the Bull's gesture. A pale flake stuck to Dorian's brown nose. He wrinkled it. 

"I confess," Dorian drawled, "I grow tired of winter. Freezing has somewhat lost its charm over recent events."

"Just recently? Thought your footsies froze off months ago," said the Bull.

"And yet, my forgiving nature prevailed," said Dorian.

This won't end well, the Bull wanted to say. I can't be what you need. Well, he thought, and why couldn't something good come from it anyway? If you're going to plant a field, first you have to dig out the rocks.

"Chargers'll be wondering what I'm doing out here so long," said the Bull. "Why don't you sit in with the guys? Unless you got something more pressing to do."

"Oh, how untimely. I fancied a walk down the mountain," said Dorian dryly. "Well, since you so generously asked." He preceded the Bull to the door to haul it open for the Bull.

"What a gentleman," said the Bull. He darted a look at Dorian. "You going to pick up my tab too?"

A smile dimpled Dorian's cheek. "Hardly," he said. "I'm a man in exile. You can't expect me to pay for your evening's drinks. No, I'll pay for my own drink, and you can pay for your drink, and then we won't owe each other anything at all."

It won't last, the Bull thought to say; then the Bull thought: did he want it to last? 

The light from within the tavern illuminated Dorian's strong features with a fineness that the fire in the wilderness had not, even as Dorian sat in the Bull's lap and wound his arms about the Bull's neck and gave to the Bull of Dorian's own warmth.

"Yeah," said the Bull. "That sounds great. For a 'vint, Dorian, you got some good ideas."

"My brilliance is legend," said Dorian. "Am I ever wrong?"

"Ask me tomorrow," the Bull said. "Depends how much I have to drink."

"Why, Iron Bull," Dorian said, turning to show the Bull his arching brow, "you don't mean to say _you_ fear a head ache?"

"I just don't want to scrape you _and_ Sera out from under a table," the Bull retorted, and Dorian laughed; and it was easy again between the two of them. 

So, the Bull thought, perhaps nothing had changed. Well, he thought, and good. Things would be as they had been before. 

The snowflakes left wet spots on Dorian's coat; they marked the breadth of his shoulders. Dorian ordered the drinks. As Cabot's man filled the mugs from the tap, Dorian loosened his scarf and the high buttons of his coat. A crescent of bared, brown throat showed. It widened. The Bull glanced to the Chargers. 

Rocky had them engaged with a demonstration of hands, and only Krem had noticed the Bull's return from the cold. With the crowd between them, Krem raised his mug casually and tipped both it and his head. The Bull shrugged. Krem shook his head and pulled his face long, but he tipped the mug again to wish him well.

Dorian nudged the Bull with an elbow, his hands occupied. Both mugs he carried sat fat with foam. The Bull took the nearest mug.

"Don't worry," said Dorian, "I instructed him to bill you your own excesses." Hand freed, he pulled the loosened scarf over his head and set it on the bar.

"To good beer," said the Bull, "and good friends to drink it with."

"So I hear," said Dorian, "and so it is," and they tapped their mugs together before they drank together. The Bull finished first. 

"You've been drinking," said Dorian hoarsely, lowering his mug, "you had an unfair advantage. Another round, barkeep, if you would."

"Hey," said the Bull, "don't take it to heart. I'm just the best at what I do."

"Why don't you put your mouth where your mug is," suggested Dorian, "and prove it?"

Dorian's lips shone. A tendril of foam clung to his mustache. He brushed his thumb along it, then wiped his thumb off on the bar. 

"All right," said the Bull. "But you better hold on to your ass, Dor'."

"My mustache quivers in anticipation," said Dorian. "Bottoms up."

"Horns down," agreed the Bull.

They lifted their mugs. Again, the Bull's came down first.

"Your mouth is bigger than mine," Dorian accused. 

The Bull signaled the barman, busy with another order. "Thought you were above making excuses."

"Never _that_ ," said Dorian. His attention wandered the floor. "Sera's certainly friendly with the evening's entertainment."

"What, Maryden?" The Bull laughed. He was surprised at how freely it came out. "She's been working on Sera for months. Pulling her in with..." He trickled his fingers, like plucking strings.

Dorian said, "She might have just asked," and he nodded thanks for the two refreshed mugs the barman sent their way. "Under the right circumstances, Sera can be very agreeable."

The Bull hummed his concession. Dorian drank deeply of his mug, but the Bull sipped at his own. He lowered it. Fingers of foam stuck to the sides. A ghostly trace of his reflection showed on the dark surface of the beer. Let it lie. Let things be as they were and so they would be.

Dorian, half-gasping, lowered his mug too. His mustache was damp; he palmed his mouth. 

"What?" He eyed the Bull askance. "Don't tell me your tolerance is met."

The Bull drained the rest of the beer as counter, and in half the time it had taken Dorian. Dorian made disgusted sounds.

"Brute." Dorian tugged free a few more buttons on his coat. The sides opened. He'd dressed lightly beneath, for all that it was piss freezing outside.

The Bull signaled the barman. He set his arm on the bar and leaned his weight against it as he considered Dorian. Dorian, stretching, his blinking languid with the settling beer, pursed his lips in question.

Maryden's song turned to something rowdy. A number of persons, laughing or shouting as they liked, took to the floor. Draped across Maryden's back, Sera sang a line of sour notes.

"Back in the valley," said the Bull.

Dorian's mouth tightened. "Must we? And we were doing so well."

The Bull drew a breath. "I need to tell you."

"You don't need to tell me anything. We've gone over everything," Dorian said.

"When the demon was talking to me," said the Bull. "The shit it said." He waited but, as unhappy as Dorian looked, he didn't interrupt. 

The Bull scrubbed at his face. The arm splinted to his side itched suddenly; he wanted to tear it free. Don't fuss with it, Tama' would say.

"It told me to kill you. Turn you over to it. Maybe both." He twisted his hand. "Not really big into knowing the kind of shit demons like to do."

Dorian, then, waited. When no more proved forthcoming, he said, "So?"

"Thought you should know," said the Bull.

"Drinks," said Cabot's man. The Bull thanked him, but Dorian ignored him to go on frowning at the Bull. The look of his eyes changed; his gaze distanced.

"It can be very, ah." Dorian's frown angled. "Persuasive. They know the things to say to you because they pull them from your head." Some sad knowing weighted his speaking.

"Fucking foul play," the Bull said. He pulled his jaw left then right, till it popped and some of the tension eased. "You don't think that I--" He rubbed at his jaw, massaging that popped corner. "That it was already. Shit." The Bull scowled at his drink. "Forget it."

Dorian cleared his throat as he, too, turned to consider drink. "No. I don't think that deep down inside you really want to wring my neck. Aside from those tantalizing invitations you no longer make."

Acknowledging the point, the Bull twitched a smile. Then Dorian added, "You're just not that sort of man," and the Bull let the smile go. He looked to his palm: the long crease in it, the faded patchwork of scars marking it.

"And what sort of 'man' am I?" He stressed the common word. 

For a time the noises of the tavern created a silence between them, and in that space, as Dorian ordered his words to speak, the Bull thought a hundred things of death. Spears, long arrows, the sword: the inevitable fate of the battle-mad. Dorian stirred. 

"A very good one," he said, somewhat gruff, and the Bull lifted his head from contemplation of his life-line. Dorian, of all things, looked embarrassed to be seen. "You've been patient with me in times when I most deserved--well. Suffice to say I have not always been at my best with you."

"No shit," said the Bull, but it came rote.

Dorian bristled. "And of course the demon tried to get you to turn me over to it. Unless you've some secret double life you haven't managed to tell everyone of, I _am_ the mage. Your muscles are very..." He gestured broadly. "But if muscles were all a demon wanted, well."

The Bull went on staring at Dorian. 

"I intend no offense," said Dorian.

The Bull opened his mouth to reply, and instead he laughed. Helplessly he looked at Dorian again and laughed all the harder at Dorian's sour expression. 

"I'm not wrong."

Smiling at the drink, the Bull said, "You're a sweet guy, Dorian. You know that?"

This did not mollify Dorian. He prickled more, even as he drew up a stool to sit beside the Bull. 

"Oh, please! I am no such thing. I'll have you know I'm a very wicked man indeed."

"Sure you are."

"Hideously deformed of character." 

"But you didn't give in to it," said the Bull. "Whatever it wanted."

Dorian drank, somewhat unsteadily at first. The mug hid his face. When he set the drink down again he was composed, though he sloshed the beer some.

"Yes, well, all its suggestions sounded like the sort of morally debased affront to free will my father would consider." He bittered.

The Bull shifted so that he was turned to Dorian. He leaned in; his shoulder blocked Dorian off from the rest of the room.

"You're not your father."

"Of course not." Dorian smiled. "I'm far more handsome." He warmed to the joke. "And wild son of a magister though I may be, I'm not entirely depraved. Any more than you're entirely an uncivilized, unwashed beast."

"Careful, there," said the Bull. He touched his finger to the side of Dorian's mug, catching a slow-dripping bead of beer on the knuckle. "I might think you've gone soft on me."

"You might think that," Dorian allowed. That sweetness in him came through. He nudged the Bull again. "Another toast. To not tearing out each other's throats because a demon told us to."

"Sure," said the Bull, "I'll drink to that." They did.

Dorian flashed his tongue between his teeth. "Maker, that's foul! I'm for whiskey, if you're up for it."

"You know me," said the Bull. "I'm always up for it."

"I wish I knew less of you."

"Nah," the Bull said. "You don't."

"No," said Dorian, "I don't. First to finish, shall we say six shots? Wins the best Cabot's kitchens offer."

"Love me that stew," said the Bull. "Deal."

"To immediate regrets," said Dorian. 

The Bull clinked his empty mug to Dorian's. "To getting through it."

Dorian smiled at the Bull. His eyes creased, a suggestion of the lines that might mark them one day, far from now.

The barman brought their shots, six each. They drank. Dorian bought the Bull his dinner. They drank some more. Singing entered the evening's events, then darts, and then the Bull took Dorian to his room.

Epilogue.

At a spot in that venerable fortress where a long row of windows looked upon a courtyard, or did when the glass was not white with frost, two men met.

The Bull's boot heel dragged across the stone. Dorian looked up at the sound. Each had reason to hesitate. 

Here is a simple truth known to Dorian and likewise the Bull: The enormity of a thing is often misunderstood until it is before you.

Dorian lifted his chin and, too, his brow. And so? What of it? His heart was sour and quick. 

The light from the frosted windows cast strange, wan accents across the lines of the Bull's face. Catching on scars and in pits, it ought have harshened him. A darker shadow clung to the corner of the Bull's mouth, where Dorian had bit him and the skin had bruised.

Did the palms of Dorian's hands itch? He did not scratch at them. They hung, stupidly, at his sides.

The Bull hesitated. His hand rose; he scoured his chin. 

"So," he said, with great care. "Dorian. About last night."

They stood alone but for the very occasional person scurrying about the halls. Dorian's tongue caught on his teeth. "Lummox," he might have called the Bull. If he cared more for his image he could say far worse.

Dorian sighed gustily and took his arms up to fold them. His mouth pulled to a smile, wry.

"Discretion isn't really your thing, is it?" he said.

The Bull, scarred and truncated fingers framing his cheek, was still; and then a smile tightened his cheek. A laugh came to him. The Bull, so cautious the moment before, let fall his hand. He, too, readily took up the role he'd chosen.

"Three times!" he crowed, and he slung his arm around Dorian's shoulders and drew him along with the Bull down the corridor. The Bull leaned into Dorian. His breath warmed Dorian's ear. "Also, your silky underthings, did you want them back, or did you leave those, like a token?"

He was playing with Dorian: he teased. Dorian's hands did itch. 

When the Bull had finished his joke, Dorian sighed again and said, "If you choose to leave your door unlocked like a savage, I may or may not come."

"Speak for yourself," said the Bull.

Scoffing, Dorian pulled half out from the Bull's embrace. "You could do better."

The Bull's grin, impossibly, broadened. 

"Well, if you're up for it."

It was all of it a joke, surely. Nothing could last. What ever could come from such a thing? Well, and how else might they find out? Freeing, the thought: that you could throw away the future and do what you would.

"I don't need to ask if you're up for it." 

Dorian reached for the Bull's brow. His fingertips skimmed higher. The grooved texture of the Bull's horns was as Dorian remembered it, like the edges of a puzzle.

"I'm getting there," said the Bull.

Dorian tugged at his horns. The Bull obliged.

**Author's Note:**

> One final thank you, to you for reading. I hope you enjoyed it!


End file.
